From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Aug 27 02:10:12 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4BC3A16A4BF for ; Wed, 27 Aug 2003 02:10:12 -0700 (PDT) Received: from geminix.org (gen129.n001.c02.escapebox.net [213.73.91.129]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5F17B43FE9 for ; Wed, 27 Aug 2003 02:10:11 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from gemini@geminix.org) Message-ID: <3F4C756E.5080102@geminix.org> Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 11:10:06 +0200 From: Uwe Doering Organization: Private UNIX Site User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030701 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: FreeBSD Questions References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Received: from gemini by geminix.org with asmtp (TLSv1:AES256-SHA:256) (Exim 3.36 #1) id 19rwJd-000DHg-00; Wed, 27 Aug 2003 11:10:09 +0200 Subject: Re: idle process status X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 09:10:12 -0000 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@geminix.org | http://www.escapebox.net