Unable to kill runaway app. -

Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan at gmail.com
Thu Aug 20 20:18:30 UTC 2009


On Thu, 2009-08-20 at 12:31 -0700, Peter Langfelder wrote:
> 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.

To be pedantic, even -9 will only work if the process is "listening".
That's because signal-handling is done by the kernel side of the process
itself. The point about -9 (SIGKILL) is that the process can't trap or
mask it, but if it's stuck waiting on an uninterruptible kernel event
('D' state) there is nothing that will kill it short of rebooting.

poc




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