What state was the process in?
There are only two states that a process can be in that won't respond to -9:
Zombie (Z in ps), in which case the process is already dead and Apache didn't wait on
it
properly. This isn't a problem just ignore it unless you can reproduce it in
which case report it as an Apache bug.
Disk wait (D in ps), which is actually any uninterruptible sleep, usually disk
i/o, indicates either something is broken in your kernel or that you're using
NFS.
In the case of disk wait you can actually get the wait channel from ps and
look it up in your kernel symbol table to find out what resource it was
waiting on. What you would do with that information isn't clear though. I
suppose it might point the way to what component of the system was misbehaving
if the problem occurred frequently.
Bill Moseley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Yes, a system problem, I guess, if kill -9 doesn't work I'm not sure what
> will work. I tried a truss, but it reported "truss: cannot control process
> 3732" which I assume is because it's parent is root, and my cgi was running
> as nobody.
root should be able to truss any process other than init. I suspect this
message meant the process was actually a zombie and not really alive at all.
--
greg
