On my home, family machine, members of the household are quite happy
to 'Switch User' and open up a session for themselves - they seem far less
happy to log out again at the end of a session. *This usually means there are
several, three, maybe four, active sessions running on the one machine. *If
one of these sessions has some processor intensive task running, say they've
left a browser on some flash rich page, system response times really plummet.

Instruction and education to family members, some times with a larting stick,
has not reaped the rewards one might have hoped for. *So ...

What is the most graceful way, as a super user, to log out another user
closing all of their processes and ending their session?

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On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 2:10 PM, Colin Murphy <Colin@spudulike.me.uk> wrote:
> On my home, family machine, members of the household are quite happy
> to 'Switch User' and open up a session for themselves - they seem far less
> happy to log out again at the end of a session. This usually means there are
> several, three, maybe four, active sessions running on the one machine. If
> one of these sessions has some processor intensive task running, say they've
> left a browser on some flash rich page, system response times really plummet.
>
> Instruction and education to family members, some times with a larting stick,
> has not reaped the rewards one might have hoped for. So ...
>
> What is the most graceful way, as a super user, to log out another user
> closing all of their processes and ending their session?

Hmm - not sure how graceful this is, but I usually do "sudo pkill -U
<username>". I have not tried this recently (don't multi-seat that
often anymore) - it should not cause any great harm, but you might
want to test it out first.

Chris

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Colin Murphy wrote:
> On my home, family machine, members of the household are quite happy
> to 'Switch User' and open up a session for themselves - they seem far less
> happy to log out again at the end of a session. This usually means there are
> several, three, maybe four, active sessions running on the one machine. If
> one of these sessions has some processor intensive task running, say they've
> left a browser on some flash rich page, system response times really plummet.
>
> Instruction and education to family members, some times with a larting stick,
> has not reaped the rewards one might have hoped for. So ...
>
> What is the most graceful way, as a super user, to log out another user
> closing all of their processes and ending their session?
>

There is no graceful way.

You can sudo killall -u username, which will send the sigterm signal.
In theory.. applications should respect it and shut down, but will often
ignore saving session information or data.

If the concern is a cpu hungry task, you can always simply renice or
suspend the process. However, if system response time is suffering so
badly, I suspect your issue is more likely to be RAM starvation, and the
system response slugishness is caused by swapping.

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