Do Windows and Mac OS X have processes? If so, are they different from each other?
Best Answer
All modern operating systems (yes, including Windows) have processes. The Windows and Linux implementations do differ - for example, on Linux separate processes (fork()/exec()) are used more often, and Windows prefers threads of a single process. Mac OS X is based on BSD, so its processes are the same as in any other BSD (or Linux).
No. killall first lists all processes that are to be killed, and then iterates through that list and kills them. If you have a forkbomb running, after killall will kill one of its processes, it is very likely that another process will immediately reclaim PID which has just freed, but killall thinks it already killed that process, so effectively nothing will happen.
You should use ulimit if a forkbomb is a problem for you. Limit number of processes to, for example, 128, and a forkbomb will silently die or stop expanding, depending on how it was written. Anyway, it will not present any danger to other users of that system.
You're always going to have at least n + 1 chrome.exe processes, where n is the number of unique domains you have open across all visible tabs. The +1 is for the "Browser" process coordinating everything else. (e.g. I have 5 tabs open, 4 for SuperUser, 1 for another site. I have 2 Tab processes open)
You'll also have processes for any extensions that might have a background window open. (e.g. Adblock Plus, Ghostery, Stylish, NinjaKit all require an extra process)
Hit Shift+Esc or go to Chrome's Task Manager (under the Tools menu/sub-menu depending on which version of Chrome you're running) to see a list of all the processes and what they're being used for.
Best Answer
All modern operating systems (yes, including Windows) have processes. The Windows and Linux implementations do differ - for example, on Linux separate processes (
fork()/exec()) are used more often, and Windows prefers threads of a single process. Mac OS X is based on BSD, so its processes are the same as in any other BSD (or Linux).