How can I kill a Windows Process that refuses to die

Question

Running Windows Server 2003, I have some processes that when killed take a a few minutes of 100% cpu to die.

Using Process Explorer to view the processes threads I always see 2 threads, with one of them using lots of cpu and stuck in !endthreadex

Any idea what could cause these processes to not-die for so long? Is there any way for me to force kill such a process?

@John, "Process Explorer" is a task manager on drugs: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx — l0c0b0x, Oct 14 '09 at 04:01
Sorry, it seems Process Explorer has grown up. I haven't looked at it for quite a few years. — John Gardeniers, Oct 14 '09 at 06:31
the process I'm trying to kill is .Net application that I wrote. It also loads some native dlls. I thought that killing should always work. What could cause a process not to die? — DanJ, Oct 14 '09 at 07:32

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 14 '09 at 09:59

When you try to kill a process, Windows will first attempt to end it gracefully through the normal code paths before taking it down forcefully. The reason why it's stuck at 100% CPU is most likely that you have a loop or similar in your tear down that is spinning around waiting for something to happen (e.g. like a database connection to completely close) without a Thread.Sleep in it. It's possible that the something it's waiting for never happens (owing to the abnormal exit caused by killing it) and so it's stuck until Windows decides to take it down by force. Examine your shutdown code for the process and you should find the culprit for that.

Appropriate for SO at this stage, I would think.

Does this mean that "kill" is really only sending the process a signal to stop, and then wait for it? Is there a way to control the timeout? — DanJ, Oct 17 '09 at 20:54

How can I kill a Windows Process that refuses to die

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