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Something more powerful then kill -9

Nothing. The only time a process can't be killed by 'kill -9' is when it's stuck in the kernel, usually in a D state meaning that it's waiting on I/O. Sometimes you can make it return by causing the I/O to fail, i.e. if it'a trying to read a bad DVD you can force the disc out and that'll usually cause the processes accessing the DVD to fail their reads and return.
 
Hmm D as in defunct? that's what it says in ps aux. I don't want to reboot to break my 240 day uptime but I need to physically move the server soon anyway, so what the heck... it's due for a reboot. 😛 I need to try to pull off 1 year with that server, would be pretty good for a home server.
 
just realized I have several apps showing as defunct. What causes this and how would I avoid it? Should I maybe reboot the server every now and then?
 
It's not defunct, the process is still alive, zombies are defunct. I believe D was chosen for the state because the function that usually caused it was down(). Now with the finer granularity locking in most kernels I don't think that's the cause, but the status type remains.

A process gets into a D state because it asked the kernel to do something on it's behalf, usually I/O, and it hasn't returned yet. You can't kill the process because the kernel is in the middle of something and there might be other locks held.
 
What showed them as defunct? AFAIK top, atop and ps just show the state letter representation and in that case D means uninterruptible sleep, not defunct.
 
was ps aux, it said <Defunct>. Not sure if this is the same as the D status you mentioned. I just assumed but I may be wrong. Ended up rebooting but for some reason the server did not come back up, so I'll have to go to my parent's house tomorrow to check up. That or it hit a disk check, and that may take a while on a 1.8TB raid 5.
 
And if you look in the STAT column it probably said Z, not D. Although since you said the box didn't come back up then a disk problem is likely.
 
I hope not... I really don't have time for this nor am I in any physical position to fix this. I have raid but I have yet to figure out how to make it alert me if a disk fails so maybe 2 drives failed... think everything would of stopped working though, so it's probably not that.
 
There are several reasons that a process might get stuck in a D state, however pending I/O is the most common one and if a process stays in that state for a long time it usually means there's a hardware problem. However, I think it's more likely that they were actually zombies of processes that exited but weren't properly reaped by their parent.
 
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