[Python-Dev] Status of thread cancellation (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Mar 20 00:52:19 CET 2007

Nick Maclaren wrote:

You don't always SEE the stuck process - sometimes the 'kill -9' causes the pid to become invisible to ps etc., and just occasionally it can continue to use CPU until the system is rebooted.

If that happens, there's a bug in the kernel. A process killed with -9 shouldn't be using any resources at all, other than a tiny piece of kernel memory for its process structure until it gets reaped.

Sockets get jammed because they are used to connect to subprocesses or kernel threads, which in turn access unreliable I/O devices.

But it's not the socket which is jammed -- if you kill the process on the other end of it, anything connected to the socket will get EOF or SIGPIPE. (If you can't kill the process on the other end, even with -9, then again you have a kernel bug.)

-- Greg

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