How do you kill a defunct mysqld process and why do they become "defunct" ?

I can't seem to kill the process at all.

There are a few mentions of this on the MySQL mailing list, archives of which can be found here:

http://groups.google.com/...iling.database.mysql

If you want to force a process to abort on your system, send kill a SIGKILL signal. i.e. kill -9.

Signal 9, SIGKILL, cannot be blocked, trapped, or ignored by a process. This is useful, when you're trying to kill off a process that won't listen to (the default) SIGTERM (-15) for some reason.

- wil

>>kill -9<<

Yeah, it's killall -9 mysql but I ended up having to do a reboot anyway.

Thanks anyway though, I found some stuff about possible reasons for it on google groups.

Kill -9 should be a last resort, as it doesn't give mysql a chance to shutdown. If you ever have to do a -9, make sure to do a full check/repair of all your data tables before you restart mysql.

Cheers,

Alex
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