# Old Running Process



## adriftinitland (Dec 28, 2011)

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 (Dec 28, 2011)

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 (Dec 29, 2011)

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


----------



## fluca1978 (Dec 29, 2011)

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 (Dec 29, 2011)

Thank you fluca1978. That is helpful.


----------

