Unkillable processes?

[Jerry Feldman]

On Friday 17 February 2006 1:58 pm, Dan Coutu wrote:
> Okay, here's a strange one.
>
> On a Red Hat 9 system I've encountered a situation where there are two
> processes that I cannot kill when using kill -9 (or any other value, for
> that matter.)
>
> What's the deal with that? The only kind of process that I've ever run
> across that I could not kill was a zombie and neither one of these is a
> zombie.
>
> Just to add more confusion to the mix, or maybe a useful clue, the
> system load average is about 4 but top shows 97% system idle time.
> Strange.
We ran into the same type of thing on a RHEL 3.0 Update 4 system a few weeks 
ago. I think we decided that it was waiting on I/O that did not complete. 

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
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