[ale] Wow! Check out these load averages!

[Danny Cox]

Jonathan,

On Mon, 2003-03-10 at 20:59, Jonathan Glass (IBB) wrote:
> OK.  What does "DN" mean?  The man page says "uninterruptable sleep (due
> to I/O) and "low-priority").  How do I kill these processes?
> 
> # ps -aux | grep ftp
> root      7786  0.0  0.3  2188  780 ?        DN   Mar07   0:00 ftpd:

	D: yep, it's in a "short sleep".  'D' for disk, usually.  There are
other places in the kernel that'll put the process into a "short sleep",
but seeing as how it's ftpd, it's probably waiting for a disk I/O to
complete.  While in this state, it's unkillable, because the system
isn't delivering signals to the process.  It'll get them all (signals)
if whatever it's waiting for occurs.  A 'ps axl' will also print the
WCHAN, the wait channel, which will be the function/structure it's
waiting on, assuming you have /boot/System.map pointing to the correct
system map....

	You might look at the logs to see if you're having disk errors.

	N: the process has niced itself, or it's ancestor processes niced
itself.  No biggie.

-- 
kernel, n.: A part of an operating system that preserves the
medieval traditions of sorcery and black art.

Danny

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