<page xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/1.0/"
      type="topic" style="task"
      id="process-status">

  <info>
    <revision pkgversion="3.11" date="2014-01-28" status="complete"/>
    <link type="guide" xref="index#processes-info" group="processes-info" />
    <link type="seealso" xref="process-kill" />
    <link type="seealso" xref="cpu-check" />
    
    <include href="legal.xml" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"/>
    
    <credit type="author copyright">
      <name>Phil Bull</name>
      <email>philbull@gmail.com</email>
      <years>2014</years>
    </credit>

    <desc>The status of a process can be running, sleeping, stopped, or zombie.</desc>
  </info>

  <title>What do the process statuses mean?</title>

  <p>The status of a process tells you whether it is currently doing something or not. There are four statuses that a process can have:</p>

  <terms>
    <item>
      <title>Running</title>
      <p>Processes that are currently doing something (for example, a web
      browser loading a web page). Running processes are those that are
      actively using the processor (CPU).</p>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Sleeping</title>
      <p>Processes that are not currently doing anything (for example, because
      they are waiting for something to happen). They don't use any of the
      processor's time, but still take up memory. If they need to do something,
      they will "wake up" and change their status to <em>running</em>.</p>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Stopped</title>
      <p>A <em>stopped</em> process is one that has been put to sleep manually.
      You might want to stop a process temporarily if it is using too much
      processing time, for example.</p>
      <p>To do this, click the process in the <gui>Processes</gui> tab, then
      right-click it and select <gui>Stop</gui> from the menu that appears. You
      can wake it up again by clicking <gui>Continue</gui> on the same
      menu.</p>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Zombie</title>
      <p>A zombie process is one that has finished running and will never start
      again, but is being kept in the list of processes for some reason. This
      usually happens because it was started by another program that needs to
      know if it finished successfully or not, but which has not checked on the
      process yet.</p>
      <p>Zombie processes do not use any memory or processing time, and will
      eventually go away. You do not need to do anything to get rid of them.</p>
    </item>
  </terms>

  <p>The majority of processes will either be running or sleeping.</p>

</page>
