idle process status

[Uwe Doering]

Michelle wrote:
> Could anyone please tell me what might cause a process to enter an I 
> status or idle status.  I had two cron jobs which did not run a few 
> nights ago, specifically the daily run output and aide.  The next day 
> when I looked at the status of the jobs with the ps aux command, it 
> stated that the status was I or idle for both of these cron jobs.

Idle state means that this process didn't run (that is, slept) for at 
least 20 seconds.  Please see man page ps(1).  It is just a flag and 
does nothing special to the process.

> I was 
> unable to kill the jobs even with kill -9 and had to reboot the server.  
> Now everything is fine and the cron jobs ran again last night; however, 
> I would like to know what might cause this so I can prevent it from 
> happening again.

A sleeping process that cannot be killed is usually the result of either 
a kernel bug or some hardware problem (lost interrupt, hanging 
controller etc.) that blocks the intended demise of the process.  But 
without further debugging it is impossible to tell what it is exactly.

    Uwe
-- 
Uwe Doering         |  EscapeBox - Managed On-Demand UNIX Servers
gemini at geminix.org  |  http://www.escapebox.net