killing processes

[James McDonald]

On Tue, 2008-12-02 at 15:54 -0800, Lonni J Friedman wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 6:41 AM, Machiel Richards
> <MachielR at agilitytech.co.za> wrote:
> > Hi all
> >
> >
> >
> >                 I hope someone can assist......
> >
> >
> >
> >                 We have a cron that runs regularly....however one of the
> > child processes produced by the cron keeps on running even after the cron
> > has completed...
> >
> >
> >
> >                 This uses up a lot of resources and we have not been able to
> > kill it, not even by using kill -9.
> >
> >
> >
> >                 This is on a production system and we cannot afford to
> > reboot the server.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >                 Can anybody perhaps tell us how to kill these type of
> > processes?
> >
> 
> You can't.  If kill -9 doesn't work, then the process is either a
> zombie, or blocked on IO of some kind.


If you are running from cron and the process is hanging but you can't
kill it. Try finding out if the process launches any children that
aren't returning using pstree

Another problem I found was that processes are trying to talk to a
console or terminal and perhaps expecting input.

I ended up sending output to a log file and trying to deduce where in
the script it was hanging...




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