Killing hung windows processes

[jas0420]

I just blindly stumbled into something cool that the *nix folks have that I didn't think us Windows folks did. Thought I'd shared.

I keep having problems with scripts randomly not closing. Ping scripts in particular for some reason. If I let the box go for a while, I'd log in and find 20 or more cmd.exe processes. I started using a utility called tping with a cool script from Misora (thread here: http://forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?t=8497). So then I started finding 20 or more tping.exe processes hung on top of the cmd.exe. It has definitely caused performance problems on the box.

Turns out, there's a utility in Windows called "taskkill" (I've verified it is in XP and 2K3... Assume it's in 2000 also, but not verified) that lets you kill a process from the command line. I am only using about 55 seconds out of the alotted 5 minutes in between Cacti cycles, so I just scheduled a new task with the simple line below in the sceduled task's "run" field.

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"taskkill /f /im cmd.exe /im tping.exe"

My Cacti scripts run every :00 and :05, so I just had this run every :09 and :04. Will wipe out any cmd windows that you might be working in at the time, so keep that in mind. I'll probably tone down the frequency that I run it once I'm done tinkering. There are a boat-load of switches that you can use in conjuntion with taskkill (see them with taskkill /?) to fine tune it to your needs.

'Njoy,
Jason

[BSOD2600]

I've had similar problems in the past. I prefer to use the pstool kit from www.sysinternals.com which I run once an hour.

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@echo off
cd C:\Program Files\SysInternals\Pstools
pskill perl.exe
pskill php.exe
pskill cmd.exe

[TheWitness]

I have fixed both the ss_tping and ss_fping to use Cacti's internal ping constructs, which are faster and won't cause you the hung process issues so long as you are either running cmd.php or Cactid 0.8.6e.

TheWitness