cannot kill -9 a process

Dan Nelson dnelson at allantgroup.com
Tue May 10 10:18:15 PDT 2005


In the last episode (May 10), Athanasios Douitsis said:
> Hello all,
> 
> I have run into a peculiar problem. A process in one of my servers
> has stopped working, but when I kill -9 the pid the process won't go away.
> 
> ps axuw | grep nagios
> nagios 36818  0.0  0.1  3964 2184  ??  TLs  30Mar05  46:14.69 /usr/local/bin/nagios -d /usr/local/etc/nagios/nagios.cfg

T means the process has been stopped. "ps axlw" will also print the
wchan column, which is what part of the kernel the process was waiting
in before it was stopped, and the flags column, which may tell you what
kind of stop it's in (see the ps manpage to decode the flags).  On 5.3
I would occasionally see threaded processes hang when multiple threads
tried to fork at once, but they usually freed themselves up after 20
seconds or so.  If that's the case, upgrading to 5.4 will help.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list