hanging map reduce processes

[Henning Blohm]

Hi,

found that several people have run into this issue, but I was not able 
to find a solution yet.

We have reduce tasks that leave a hanging "child" process. The 
implementation uses a lot of third party stuff and leave Timer threads 
running (as you can readily see in thread dumps). Which is bad style - 
no doubt. But eventually we don't really care - when the reduce is done, 
its done and the process should be really just killed rather than 
hanging around and eventually impacting the cluster.

Is there a way to force killing of child processes, e.g. based on job 
configuration?

Thanks,
  Henning