Weird process
 

Hi all

I awoke this morning and turned on my linux machine. When I started firefox I got a system message stating "Could not start. The current process is not responding. You must turn the process off and start again."...kind of message. So I brought up konsole and did a TOP command. In TOP, at the very top....were two processes...one called Web Con+ with a total time of 102:15:65 and then right below it was the not responding firefox process with a total time of 72:33:71.


The previous night I had been watching an amazon prime movie, but I thought I had shut that down. If I didn't shut this down, and amazon did on their end could this have truncated the process name from web content to web con+ and caused firefox to hang? Thanks

I'd just kill the firefox process. If the Web Con+ process is a child process of the firefox process, you should be able to kill the firefox process and the Web Con+ should also be killed.

Try running the following command:

Replace firefox_pid_here with Firefox's PID (process ID), that you can get from the top command. You can also use the kill command to kill the Web Con+ process if need be.

Let us know how it works out for you.

if you just want to do a quick kill in lue of going through all that it takes to find the pid for Firefox first.

killall firefox

does it in a pinch. sometimes I get them kind of messages when I click to start Firefox more than once, and it gets confused and I just wait it out. nothing majorly serous in my option.

How could Web Con+ be a child of Firefox when Web Con+ has been running for 102 hours and Firefox has been running for 72 hours?

What's more important would be the %CPU and %MEM that these processes are using, not the fact that they have been running for so long.

You may have to use:Or optionally:I'm also assuming that when you stated that you "turned on" your machine, that it was already on, and you merely woke it up from sleep?

I would kill the firefox process because you were trying to open a web browser and it complained. Not familiar with Web Con+, but it appears to be a web server. If you do not deem that important you could kill that as well. A reboot should clear that up either case.

Indeed indeed. The main question being..."is somebody busting into my machine?" Probably not, however one can't be too careful.

I ended up killing both promptly, and could find no reference to any processes on the net called 'web con+' however, that doesn't necessarily mean that it was/is malign. I'll just have to keep an eye on things in the future. I'm running Mint which comes with a default root pass, that I don't know(at the moment).

Thanks for the other command suggestions guys. Great help.

taking this out of top listings
using "web content process firefox" in google I got a hand full of hits on it.

Hey, thanks for reply. When I was searching at first, and paranoid, I was searching 'web con+' as that's how the process appeared in the konsole(full screen). When I look at the konsole now and minimize the window, I notice that other processes become truncated in the same manner(____+). Strange that it was listed as such even at full screen, however that's now besides the point. Cheers!

Thanks for everyone's help.