Re: A Question ... (dumb?)

On Fri, 10 Jan 1997, Francis Vidal wrote:
>if you look at the system processes, ("ps -ax" on my system), you can see
>a) squid -sY b) 5 dnsserver c) ftpget -S 1630 ... if you want to re-read
>squid.conf, kill it with a HUP sig. killing "squid" with kill -9 will halt
>the dnsserver and ftpget.

While this isn't really the appropriate list, killing squid with -9 is as
inappropriate as killing any other application with state data with -9.
squid has proper signal handlers which keep the mis-named "log" file
up-to-date, etc, and shutdown cleanly.

killing squid with 'kill -15' would be a much nicer thing to do, giving it
a chance to shutdown properly. 'kill -9' should rarely, if ever, be used
on unix except where a bug is encountered in a poorly written
application, or system errors are causing problems (eg, can't schedule
applications to run their termination signal handlers). Even on shutdown,
most operating systems send around a kill -15, delay, then kill -9
anything left over.

And of course, it's always better to use "kill -TERM" in place of
'kill -15', and "kill -KILL" in place of 'kill -9', since it produces
less problem with typos (kill -1 1, miss the last 1 off, problem...).

David.
Received on Thu Jan 09 1997 - 18:29:51 MST