What is a "stuck" process?
Using the top command in Terminal, and ordering the list by state, I see a number of processes on Yosemite 10.10.1 whose state is stuck. I've looked through man ps and man top for an explanation, and done some googling, without enlightenment.
Nothing's apparently wrong with the system - in fact, coreaudiod (one of the stuck processes) is racking up CPU and merrily driving the sound system - but I'm curious what is "stuck" about them and whether this is cause for concern.
Processes: 198 total, 2 running, 5 stuck, 191 sleeping, 747 threads 21:42:18
Load Avg: 1.23, 1.21, 1.17 CPU usage: 0.72% user, 1.44% sys, 97.83% idle SharedLibs: 15M resident, 15M data, 0B linkedit.
MemRegions: 367655 total, 2827M resident, 92M private, 294M shared. PhysMem: 7320M used (912M wired), 870M unused.
VM: 481G vsize, 1064M framework vsize, 0(0) swapins, 0(0) swapouts. Networks: packets: 41886204/42G in, 35471289/14G out.
Disks: 491864/8916M read, 1290630/36G written.
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #WQ #PORT MEM PURG CMPR PGRP PPID STATE BOOSTS %CPU_ME %CPU_OTHRS UID FAULTS COW
261 coreaudiod 1.0 01:12.19 5 1 206 2412K 0B 0B 261 1 stuck *0[1] 0.00000 0.00000 202 233919 198
231 accountsd 0.0 00:01.74 3 1 70 5092K 0B 0B 231 1 stuck 0[244] 0.00000 0.00000 501 11585 418
206 distnoted 0.0 00:24.10 3 1 143 4284K 0B 0B 206 1 stuck *0[1] 0.00000 0.00000 501 70899 90
197 coresymbolic 0.0 00:00.35 3 2 23 996K 0B 0B 197 1 stuck 0[188] 0.00000 0.00000 0 57709 124
37 mds 0.0 02:54.01 4 1 802 44M 0B 0B 37 1 stuck *0[1] 0.00000 0.00000 0 956495 1227
92425 tccd 0.0 00:00.00 2 1 26 972K 0B 0B 92425 1 sleeping 0[3] 0.00000 0.00000 235 935 124
92414 AssetCacheLo 0.0 00:00.68 4 0 74 3232K 0B 0B 92414 1 sleeping 0[22] 0.00000 0.00000 235 5147 175
The significance of stuck is that the process is not running while in a state that is uninterruptible while it waits for I/O. There’s nothing wrong, just that the kernel has accepted an I/O and it’s “stuck” waiting for that response before it can be paused or sent a signal to exit (or more likely continue to run normally).
- How does 'stuck' (in results of 'top') relate to 'not responding' (in Activity Monitor), 'spin' or 'hang'?