Old Running Process

[adriftinitland]

I occasionally use Webmin 1.57 on my server. I noticed a root process that is always idle and has been running a very long time, since Oct 25th i.e. 2 months. That was when Freebsd FreeBSD was last started. I don't know what the process is but I suspect it may be an ssh session that was never exited properly if that is even possible. I would like to know if is safe to terminate this process with Webmin without some catastrophic event occurring?

I have two screen captures of Webmin.

 

[fnucc]

Idle process with PID 11 runs when nothing else is runnable. So, it lives happily on your computer, doing what is suppose to do

 

[adriftinitland]

So it is perfectly normal then. Thanks. I appreciate the reply.

 

[fluca1978]

Just a note: you have to avoid confusing the status of a process with the command it is executing. In your case process 11 is executing the idle command, while another process could be in an idle status (i.e., not running). As already explained, the idle process (i.e., that executing the idle-command) is used as a marker to occupy the CPU doing nothing when there is nothing to do.

 

[adriftinitland]

Thank you fluca1978. That is helpful.