On 2003.10.26 14:21, Barry Samuels wrote:
Is there any way of killing these processes? The only way that I have found is to reboot which seems a bit drastic.
Normally, a kill command sends the signal SIGTERM which the application can set its own handler for or ask to be blocked or ignored. If the application won't die with a normal kill then you can try sending it SIGKILL with 'kill -KILL' or 'kill -9'. Only use SIGKILL if a normal kill fails as it doesn't give the application any chance to tidy up like deleting temp files, message queues or shared memory.
If the process will not die even with SIGKILL then it is probably in an "uninterruptible sleep" which shows in the 'S' column of ps -l as 'D'. Normally this means it is waiting for disk I/O to comeplete but can be waiting for file I/O on an NFS mounted disk when the 'intr' mount option was not used. If it isn't using NFS then this probably indicates a hardware fault (faulty disk, or disk interrupts being lost) or a kernel bug.
Steve.