For those of you who run Linux servers who seem to have "something" eating up all of your resources/CPU time:

1. Log into your server via SSH

2. Once you're logged into your server, at the command prompt type:

#top
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3. Once you see the list of processes that are running on your server, look in the CPU column and see which process is using the highest amount of your CPU.

4. Once you find this process, look all the way to the left of that same line and you'll see a number that is called the PID which stands for "Process ID" (make note of the number). You want to kill this process by following these steps:

While you have top running, hit your k key. By hitting the k key, you will now see: Kill PID 823 with signal [15]:

Example:

Cpu(s): 4.0% user, 1.4% system, 0.0% nice, 94.6% idle
Mem: 1033504k total, 723376k used, 310128k free, 94012k buffers
Swap: 2000084k total, 0k used, 2000084k free, 231276k cached
PID to kill:


Now enter the PID number of the process you want to kill.

<enter>

Type y for yes.

<enter>

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Another method of killing a process is as follows:

# ps aux | grep name_of_process

At the command line type: kill -9 PID_Number_Here

You can also type:

# killall -9 name_of_process which will kill any process with that name.

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