Unkillable processes

[David Demelier]

2013/5/19 Joshua Isom <jrisom at gmail.com>:
> On 5/19/2013 3:00 PM, David Demelier wrote:
>>
>> Hello there,
>>
>> I've had a process on state "pfault" and it was just unkillable, kill
>> -9 had no effects and because the script was doing an infinite loop
>> the machine was slower and slower so the only way to fix that was a
>> reboot.
>>
>> Why kill -9 has still no effects on some bad processes?
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> --
>> Demelier David
>
>
> A process can be unkillable if it's holding a lock, like reading from disk.
> Eventually, the lock will release and it should die.  You can use limits to
> change how much CPU and memory a process can use.  My guess is what happened
> is it started using a lot of memory, but you ran out and have a lot of swap.
> It was trying to run while using your hard drive instead of ram.  With
> limits, you should be able to prevent it from using swap which could help,
> and cap the amount of ram and cpu.

Hello, thank you for that precise explanation, I will add limits into
the new rctl.conf, however I don't know how many amount of ram I
should allow, in fact I have absolutely no idea how much of ram an
usual program eats, is 50Mo enough for user applications ?

Regards,

--
Demelier David