Which of the following commands would address the issue?

A Linux administrator is troubleshooting a memory-related issue.

Based on the output of the commands:

Which of the following commands would address the issue?
A . top -p 8321
B . kill -9 8321
C . renice -10 8321
D . free 8321

View Answer

Answer: B

Explanation:

The command that would address the memory-related issue is kill -9 8321. This command will send a SIGKILL signal to the process with the PID 8321, which is the mysqld process that is using 99.7% of the available memory according to the top output. The SIGKILL signal will terminate the process immediately and free up the memory it was using. However, this command should be used with caution as it may cause data loss or corruption if the process was performing some critical operations.

The other options are not correct commands for addressing the memory-related issue. The top -p 8321 command will only display information about the process with the PID 8321, but will not kill it or reduce its memory usage. The renice -10 8321 command will change the priority (niceness) of the process with the PID 8321 to -10, which means it will have a higher scheduling priority, but this will not affect its memory consumption. The free 8321 command is invalid because free does not take a PID as an argument; free only displays information about the total, used, and free memory in the system.

Reference: How to troubleshoot Linux server memory issues; kill(1) – Linux manual page