杀死CPU绑定的子进程

Question

I have a child process spawned using child_process.fork and would like to terminate it. The problem is that the child process does some lengthy CPU bound calculation and I don't have control over it. That is, the CPU bound code fragment cannot be restructured to make use of process.nextTick or polling.

A very simplified example:

parent.js

var cp = require('child_process');
var child = cp.fork('child.js');

child.js

...
while(true){} // lengthy computation which I cannot modify
...

Is it possible to terminate it? Preferably in a way that allows catching the exit event in the child in order to do some cleanups?

Sending SIGTERM/SIGKILL/etc using child.kill() doesn't seem to work on Windows. I assume even if it works on other OSes it wouldn't kill the process anyway due to child not being able to process events while doing the computation.

Answer 1

I've done this the messy way by using the PID of the process and killing it at the OS level.

Not sure how to do it in windows, but in Linux/mac I've done:

var cp      = require('child_process'),
    badJob  = cp.fork('badFile.js');

cp.execSync('kill -9 ' + badJob.pid);

The signal 9 is caught at the Kernel level , so the condition of the process is irrelevant.

Edit: In Windows you can use taskkill instead of kill. ex:

cp.execSync('taskkill /f ' + badJob.pid);