Sometime a process can take 100% of all available cpu power because it crashed. Here is a little script I used on a server for pdftk because this software was crashing from time to time.
Just launch the script from a cron job and replace “PROCESS_NAME” by the name of the process to watch.
- argument 1 : number of minutes after which the process will be killed
- argument 2 : number of seconds
#!/bin/bash
# get process id and execution time
process=`top -b -n 1 | grep PROCESS_NAME | awk '{print $1" "$11}'`
# extract pid
pid=`echo $process | awk '{print $1}'`
# extract execution time
time=`echo $process | awk '{print $2}' | awk -F ":" '{ min=$1; sec=$2; print 60*min+sec}'`
if [ $(echo "$time > 1"|bc) -eq 1 ] ; then
kill -9 $pid
echo "killed process $pid that used $time of processor power"
fi
