I was running sfill on a mount point on my laptop and had forgotten to switch on the power, so when the battery ran down the laptop hibernated (I know I should perhaps disable hibernate and I probably will).
On restart top shows sfill as status D (uninterruptible sleep) and %CPU 0.3 to 0.7, %MEM 0.0, but sounds like there is some disk activity.
Is sfill still running - are these %CPU and %MEM figures normal, or do I need to kill sfill and restart? Any implications to killing it?
Yes the process is still running but it is in uninterruptable sleep (state D) waiting on I/O. This means that process is stuck waiting for the disk and is unlikely to recover.
The best thing to do is wait and see if the process "wakes up" once the laptop has started everything back up. The only other thing to do is reboot the laptop to clear the process.
More details from stackover flow about this type of sleep can be found here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/223644/what-is-an-uninterruptable-process
sfill, verbose this time. Looking at in top I saw that it was still status D. So killed it (clean exit) and reran again and still status D with 0.3 to 0.7% CPU use. Have I found a bug in sfill? Verbose output seems stuck at 'Creating /oooooooo.ooo ...' vmstat 5 it will show you what the system is doing, you will be interested in the io column of bi/bo. What I expect is that the system is writing out lots of data to the disks.