[Buildbot-devel] Buildbot unable to kill processes on windows slaves

[Todd Whiteman]

Jonathan Rogers wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We are having trouble with buildbot being unable to kill off processes 
> on a windows slave.
> 
> The slave is running on windows vista in a command shell (not as a service).
> 
> The error we get is "buildbot.slave.commands.TimeoutError: SIGKILL 
> failed to kill process". It seems to occur any time buildbot tries to 
> kill a process (be it via the "Stop Build" button or timing out).
> 
> The annoying thing is that it requires someone to manually kill off the 
> process before another build can run because the next build is unable to 
> delete the directory due to the executable being locked.
> 
> Any ideas on how to solve this issue would be appreciated.

The Mozilla team had the same problem with their buildbots, so they 
wrote a killable process module to do what they needed:
   http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/blog/2006-12-11/killableprocesspy/