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Possibly unfreeze a process with Activity Monitor
Authored by: Stormchild on Feb 19, '08 05:13:35PM

Actually, Activity Monitor, iStat, etc. do not query, sample, or communicate in any other way with individual programs. All they do is run the command line program "top", and display the output (open up Terminal and try it for yourself; just type "top" and hit return for a similar list which updates in realtime). Merely running "top" will not "wake up" a process that is hung. The process will either finish what it's doing or not.

The only time Activity Monitor actually talks to a program is when you tell it to run a sample on that program. Nothing like that happens automatically, and in any case, iStat does not have this function at all, so if people are saying that iStat "fixes" hung process too, then it would have nothing to do with taking samples. Taking a sample from a program might provide some insight as to what it's doing, but again, this is not going to "wake up" a frozen process.

Although anything is possible, I still contend that any process that magically "wakes up" because you ran "top" would have finished whatever it was doing whether you did that or not, and that this "trick" does not actually do anything. At least until someone can definitively prove it.



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Possibly unfreeze a process with Activity Monitor
Authored by: Baby Bloc on Feb 20, '08 04:19:54AM

These are interesting anecdotes. If one wanted to add evidence, what logs would help show what caused an app to "un-hang?" Wouldn't they show (or not) the influence of AM or another "trigger?"

I can't add my own story of the wondrous AM. Since I keep it running all the time, I haven't seen it's effects when opened on a hung ap.



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