topic Re: dead process in Operating System - Linux

dead process

juno2 — Fri, 02 May 2003 06:48:35 GMT

our system often have some dead "vim" processes that run out of 99% CPU , how to prevent these dead process in the system ?

Re: dead process

Kjartan Maraas — Fri, 02 May 2003 08:14:49 GMT

You can kill the process with kill -9 (you'll find the pid using ps or top.

This isn't a long term solution of course and I'd check if there are newer versions of vim available that fixes the problem. Also, giving more details about your system makes it easier to give an accurate diagnosis of the problem.

Cheers
Kjartan

Re: dead process

Umapathy S — Fri, 02 May 2003 13:18:54 GMT

How do you say as dead processes. Are they defunct or zombies. If they are then killing wont help in clearing up the process tables.

I think they lost their control terminal and eating the CPU cycles. you can always kill them.

HTH
Umapathy

Re: dead process

Steven E. Protter — Fri, 02 May 2003 13:44:00 GMT

The process isn't dead unless its a zombie.

If system performance suffers, by all means kill it.

There is probably a configuration issue that is causing vim to use a lot of resources.

You might want to try some process tracing and try and figure out what the process is trying to do.

I had a process that was apparently orphaned and runaway on a HP box. The tusc utility shows me it kept reading and writing the same record over and over again.

I then killed it and asked the developer to kindly fix his program, which he did.

SEP

Re: dead process

Bill Douglass — Fri, 02 May 2003 16:44:36 GMT

FYI - use strace under RH Linux to trace a process:

strace -p

Re: dead process

juno2 — Tue, 06 May 2003 02:45:51 GMT

when i run "strace -p " , then it continously pop up the error

--- SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) ---
--- SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) ---
--- SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) ---
--- SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) ---
--- SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) ---
--- SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) ---
--- SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) ---
--- SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) ---
"
"
"

what is the problem , pls help to suggest ? thx.

Re: dead process

Umapathy S — Tue, 06 May 2003 09:46:53 GMT

Please give the details about the pid. When did you run strace on that. Is it your program or vim as you already mentioned.

-Umapathy