Process Not Responding

Adam_Bell · January 13, 2015, 11:59pm

I have a couple of processes that appear with Safari, I think, that periodically become “Not Responding”. When this is so, Safari 8.0.2 running in OS X 10.10.1 slows to a crawl. It recovers if I force quit these two processes: callservicesd and identityservicesd.

My problem is that “Process Not Responding” is not a process state so I’m not sure who pops that in the Activity Monitor. Is there any way (not using the Activity Monitor) to detect these and kill them?

McUsrII · January 14, 2015, 10:49am

Hello Adam.

Process not responding, is probably a translation of the more geeky ‘zombie’ state.

You can reckognize those from a terminal window, with ps -Al, since it seems the services/processes are owned by the current user. (sudo ps -Al otherwise). Be sure to have a wide enough terminal window, so the process name is visible. If you execute this next time it hangs, you may have a look at the state under the “S” column, (I am pretty sure you’ll see a “z there).”

You should also be able to kill them with kill -9 “pid”, it should also be easy to write a shell script that kills the services and thereby forces them to be restarted. -Naturally you’ll get two lines back that contains the service name, and you will ignore the one containing grep.

Hopes this helps

Shane_Stanley · January 14, 2015, 11:10am

FWIW, I don’t believe they are user processes.

McUsrII · January 14, 2015, 1:00pm

It is all in the definition of what constitutes a user procssess, they are still owned by the current user, at least the identityservicesd is owned by the current user, and is said to be run in a user context, but it is much more like an agent of course, which is the closest synonym to a service I can think of at the moment.

The importent thing here is that the operating system doesn’t differ much between daemons, agents, programs etc, but treats them all as processes, except for the init process (pid 0), which is started differently.

Adam_Bell · January 14, 2015, 3:47pm

Thanks, Gentlemen. I’ll check that out on the next hang and write a script to automate getting them restarted.

McUsrII · January 14, 2015, 6:59pm

Hello.

I found a couple of shellscripts I use for killing processes interactively, which may, or may not help. (The zap script gets a superflous process at my disk, but I don’t care to figure out why at the moment, since it is done interactively. Most probably, because the tools are upgraded since I wrote it.

Those scripts should really be put into your ~/bin folder for best results.

I hope this helps, at least as a starting point.

#!/bin/bash

zap pat: kill all processes matching pat

final version

exercise version: shows the heading of the ps command as it is.

PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:~/bin
IFS=’
’ # just a newline
case $1 in
“”) echo ‘Usage: zap [-0…15] pattern’ 1>&2; exit 1 ;;
-) SIG=$1; shift
esac
program_arguments_missing=$
processes=${program_arguments_missing:?Usage: zap [-0…15] process name 1 process name 2 …}
processes=$( echo $processes PID )
wantedprocesses=echo $processes |sed 's/ /|/g'
#must really make a temp file here, to keep the process info.
TMPFILE1=/tmp/zap$$
TMPFILE2=/tmp/zap2$$
ps -ax |egrep $wantedprocesses |sed ‘/zap/ d’ >|$TMPFILE1
head -1 <$TMPFILE1 >/dev/tty
sed -e 1d -e ‘/egrep.*PID/ d’ <$TMPFILE1 >|$TMPFILE2
kill $SIG pick \cat $TMPFILE2 ` | awk ‘{print $1}’` 2>/dev/null

Pick, is called by zap, and lets you choose wheter to choose a line, skip it, or quit altogether, the input is taken from stdin.

#! /bin/bash

$Log: pick,v $

Revisjon 1.4 uten vcs:

fjernet ynq og legger det pÃ‚ siden istedet.

Revision 1.3 2008/05/10 09:53:35 mcusr

Litt forbedret utgave; det gjenstÃ‚r noe arbeide pÃ‚ denne.

Revision 1.2 2008/05/10 09:33:14 mcusr

Ny og litt forbedret utgave av pick, - krever kun et tastettrykk – farlig.

Revision 1.2 2008/01/02 17:50:41 mcusr

Bruker yesno og slipper Ã‚ taste return etter hver kommando.

Kildekoden modifiseres ifra wrk/prj/pick for¯vrig.

### pick: select arguments

declare ret

echo $0" cmdln : $* >/dev/tty

echo “Hit Y(es), N(o) or Q(uit)” >/dev/tty

for i # for each argument
do
echo -n " “$(echo $i |sed -n ‘s/[ ]*$//p’)”:(y/n/q)?" >/dev/tty
yesno
if ret=$? ; [ $ret -eq 0 ] ; then
echo “$i”
echo " – Yes" >/dev/tty
elif [ $ret -eq 99 ] ; then
echo " – Quit" >/dev/tty
break
else
echo " – No" >/dev/tty
fi
done </dev/tty

yesno is called from pick

#! /bin/bash

### CMD Returns exitcode upon pressing y or n or q, “keypress” read code. !#

Traps ^C to keep our terminal sane under all conditions. Q - quits.

Conventions:

Under no circumstanses will the user have the possibiltiy to interrupt us by pressing ^C

Pressing ^Z on the other hand, is really a feature should the user want to inspect something

before he answer.

Then it is nice to see the previous question again after she presumably have

inspected what she was to do with the item in question.

This is the convention. Its easy to add features like All, by adding some functionality.

trap ‘’ SIGTSTP

trap - SIGTSTP

prgname=yesno
version=“1.0”
Usage=“Usage : $prgname [-huv; --help, --usage, --version ]”

version()
{
echo $prgname" : “$version”
Copyright 2008 (c) mcusr
Is put in the public domain under the GNU Gpl 2.0 license.
No warranties about what so ever are given about what so ever

to the extent permitted by law.
$prgname Needs the Bash commandline interpreter in order to work."
}

phelp()
{
echo "
$Usage
$prgname : filters the keyboard for the keypresses: [yY] [nN] [qQ] and returns a corresponding
exitcode
lets Suspend interrupts (^Z) fall through and gives an unique returncode when awakes again.
Read the manpage (yesno.1) or read the program code ($0) for information.
INTENT
$prgname : Enables swift responses from the user to the utility, and gives the caller an
opportunity to rerun any questions if the calling process was suspended. Like if the user has
suspended the program to find out if it is really sound to overwrite that file after all.
" 1>&2
}

myhandler()
{
trap ‘’ SIGCONT
echo “interrupted!!!”
exit 101
}
if [ $# -gt 0 ] ; then
if [ $# = 1 ] ; then
if [ “$1” = “-u” -o “$1” = “-h” -o “$1” = “–help” -o “$1” = “–usage” ] ; then
phelp ; exit
elif [ “$1” = “-v” -o “$1” = “–version” ] ; then
version ; exit
else
echo "Bad option $1 " 1>&2
echo $Usage 1>&2
exit
fi
else
echo "Bad nr of arguments " 1>&2
echo $Usage 1>&2
exit
fi
fi
trap ‘’ SIGINT
trap myhandler SIGCONT
while true; do {

ehco here
read -n 1 -s MYCHAR </dev/tty
case "$MYCHAR" in
([yY])
	 exit 0 ;;
([nN])
	 exit 1 ;;
([qQ])
	 exit 99 ;;
esac
} done

Shane_Stanley · January 14, 2015, 10:59pm

Right. The docs for the Cocoa class NSRunningApplication say: “NSRunningApplication is a class to manipulate and provide information for a single instance of an application. Only user applications are tracked”.

Now I can see both the processes Adam named in Activity Monitor, but when I run this script:

use framework "Foundation"
use framework "AppKit"

set theProcesses to (current application's NSWorkspace's sharedWorkspace()'s runningApplications()'s valueForKey:"localizedName") as list

neither of them is listed, although processes like universalaccessd, sharingd, EscrowSecurityAlert and rcd are all listed.

So I was using that definition.