Original article by http://blog.shineservers.com/
Sometime a process “hang” both if you are using Gnu/Linux on your desktop (maybe a game ?) or as server, in these cases the best thing to do it’s to terminate that process, that probably is using precious resources, the basic commands to do this from a terminal are kill
and killall
.
killall is a tool for ending running processes on your system based on name. In contrast, kill terminates processes based on process ID number or “PID.” kill and killallcan also send specific system signals to processes. Use killall and kill in conjunction with tools including ps to manage processes and end processes that have become stuck or unresponsive when necessary.