"Scott Marlowe" <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> I'm load testing a machine, and i'm seeing idle in transaction
> processes that are no longer hooked to any outside client, that pull
> 100% CPU and can't be kill -9ed.
To my knowledge, the only way a process can't be kill -9'd is if it's
stuck inside the kernel (typically, doing I/O to a nonresponsive disk).
There's certainly no way for a userland process to defend itself against
kill -9. So my immediate response would have been to look for a
hardware problem, or failing that a kernel bug. I see from the
subsequent thread that indeed hardware failure looks to be the answer,
but that should have been your first assumption.
regards, tom lane