Linux – What can cause “kill -9 pid” to fail

linux

I have a Linux process that is consuming 100% cpu, and "kill -9 pid" doesn't work.

This is somewhat similar to: How to kill processes unresponsive to kill -9

But I'm sure that the pid is not changing, and this is the parent processes.
I don't think it is waiting on NFS.

Could excessive network traffic cause such behavior?
Any other ideas what could cause the process to get stuck like this, and what I can do about it except rebooting?

Best Answer

Generally if a process won't respond to "kill -9", it means it's waiting for some resource. Sometimes that's a file or network read, sometimes it has a child process that hasn't exited and it's waiting for it to be reaped, or its parent is hung and can't reap it. In the latter case, the process will show up in "ps" with a status of "Z" for "Zombie".

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