Unable to kill runaway app. -

[Peter Langfelder]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Bob Goodwin<bobgoodwin at wildblue.net> wrote:
> I just had perhaps the third occurrence of this problem.
>
> I tried to shut down gthumb which was displaying a a photo from the nfs
> server. It would not shut down, at least not in a reasonable amount if time.
> Gkrellm showed cup1 running at max. and top indicated the cup at 99.5%.
> Something did eventually time out but that did not calm the cup activity.: .
>
>   3487 bobg      20   0  2928 1068  932 R 99.5  0.0 445:55.55 gam_server
>
> Kill 3487 does not stop it. In fact nothing seems to. I told it to poweroff
> and it got as far as "halting system" and stayed there until I pressed the
> power button for five seconds or so.
>
> This happened once last night and it sat there saying it was busy, the power
> button was required to kill it then too.
>
> I don't expect anyone to troubleshoot the problem but would like to know
> what other commands I might try to restore things without shutting down and
> rebooting.
>
> This is an F-10 system pretty much up to date, certainly all security
> updates and perhaps all the rest, I've lost track at the moment. I suspect
> the problem is related to some horse photo files from my daughters Mac. But
> I need a way to stop things when this happens ...
>
> Any help appreciated.
>
> Bob

As previously stated, use kill -9 <pid>. The kill command without the
-9 only works if the process actually listens to signals, which is not
likely if it's stuck in some (semi-)infinite loop.

HTH,

Peter