'crafty' took ages to kill

From: Dr. David Kirkby (see_my_signature_for_my_real_address_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 12/30/03 

Date: 30 Dec 2003 07:19:54 -0800

Sorry for the cross-posting to two quite different newsgroups, but it
seems appropiate in the circumstances.

'crafty' is a well known chess program that can run on UNIX machines.
I've just spent quite a while trying to 'kill' an unwanted 'crafty'
process running on my UNIX worksation, which I noticed had eaten up
some 61 hours of CPU time. Despite

% kill pid

then when that failed

% kill -9 pid

a couple of times, it would not die. Finally after about 5 kill -9's
the process died. Has anyone seen this before? I'm running a Sun Ultra
80 workstation, Solaris 9, 4 x 450 MHz CPUs, 4 GB RAM, crafty 19.7
built for multi-threaded operation.

What can stop a process responding to SIGKILL ?? Since there were two
copies of this process running (one intentional, one not intenstional)
each configured to use 4 CPUs, the load average was about 8, but that
should not be excessive for a quad processor machine. The machine did
not appear under any strain, and interactive peformance was fine, so
I'm a bit puzzled why this should happen.

I've seen similar things before on a Sun and once a reboot was
required. I'm just not quite sure how it can occur.

As usual, my email address can be found at
http://atlc.sourceforge.net/contact.html
should anyone choose to email me, although the newsgroup is probably a
better place for a response.

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