Date: Sun, 19 May 2013 15:28:00 -0500 From: Joshua Isom <jrisom@gmail.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Unkillable processes Message-ID: <519935D0.5080202@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <CAO%2BPfDe_N%2B1imes3w9G%2Bogzd91EDtAiQEUrD2rHXY74s2HYHug@mail.gmail.com> References: <CAO%2BPfDe_N%2B1imes3w9G%2Bogzd91EDtAiQEUrD2rHXY74s2HYHug@mail.gmail.com>
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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.
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