Can not kill processes

[vkostovic]

I have a user running several processes that are hanging. I tried to kill it (kill -9 as root) but without success.

ps -ef | grep dua
dua 4412 1 0 00:19:51 ? 0:00 vmstat 5
dua 6937 1 0 07:52:56 ? 0:00 vmstat 5
dua 10685 1 0 00:43:54 ? 0:00 vmstat 5
dua 13502 1 0 08:20:52 ? 0:00 top
dua 6310 1 0 07:50:21 ? 0:00 top
root 11821 3082 0 09:27:32 pts/15 0:00 grep dua
dua 5182 1 0 00:22:48 ? 0:00 vmstat 5
dua 15179 1 0 08:25:04 ? 0:00 vmstat 5
dua 29666 1 0 00:01:49 ? 0:00 top

If you run vmstat or top or fuser commands the processes will hang and I can not kill them.

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[SamBones]

If [tt]dua[/tt] is the userid you want to kill, try using [tt]pkill[/tt] like this...

    pkill -9 -u dua

This will kill all processes owned by [tt]dua[/tt].

One observation, I believe all three of these commands, [tt]vmstat[/tt], [tt]top[/tt], and [tt]fuser[/tt], use the [tt]/proc[/tt] filesystem to collect some or all of their information. If there's a problem with the [tt]/proc[/tt] filesystem, you'll need to reboot to fix it.

Hope this helps.

 

[vkostovic]

Thanks for your response. I can not terminate any of the processes and you were right they are running under /proc filesystem. I will likely have to reboot this server.

Here are some useful commands for troubleshooting:
root@:/proc/13502> pstack 13502
13502: top
ffffffff7e7a568c __open (0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0) + 4

root@:/proc/13502> pwdx 13502
13502: /proc

Thanks.