How do I kill a process that is dead but listening?

Question

I'm developing an app that listens on port 3000. Apparently there's an instance of it still listening to the port because whenever I start it, it can't create a listener (C#, TcpListener, but that's irrelevant) because the port is already taken.

Now, the app doesn't exist in the Task Manager, so I tried to find its PID and kill it, which led to this interesting result:

C:\Users\username>netstat -o -n -a | findstr 0.0:3000
   TCP    0.0.0.0:3000           0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       3116

C:\Users\username>taskkill /F /PID 3116
ERROR: The process "3116" not found.

I haven't seen this behaviour before and figured it was interesting enough to see if anyone has a solution.

UPDATE: I started up Process Explorer and did a search for 3000 and found this:

<Non-existent Process>(3000): 5552

I right clicked on it and chose "Close Handle". It's no longer in Process Explorer, but still shows up in netstat and still stops the app from starting the listener.

UPDATE 2: Found TCPView for Windows which show the process as "<non-existent>". Like with CurrPorts, nothing happens when I try to close the connection in this tool.

Answer 1

To avoid endless waits on the socket, your program should use the setsockopt function with the SO_REUSEADDR and SO_RCVTIMEO parameters :

SO_REUSEADDR : Allows the socket to be bound to an address that is already in use.
SO_RCVTIMEO : Sets the timeout, in milliseconds, for blocking receive calls. 

Answer 2

We had the same problem and used Process Explorer from Microsoft Sysinternals to look up the process ID that no longer existed.

It turns out that the process was referenced by several DrWatson processes. Killing those processes released the port. DrWatson is used to send memory dumps to Microsoft and this was taking several hours because the process that crashed held several tens of GBs of memory at the time.

Answer 3

I think you ought to give CurrPorts a try

CurrPorts is network monitoring software that displays the list of all currently opened TCP/IP and UDP ports on your local computer. For each port in the list, information about the process that opened the port is also displayed, including the process name, full path of the process, version information of the process (product name, file description, and so on), the time that the process was created, and the user that created it.

In addition, CurrPorts allows you to close unwanted TCP connections, kill the process that opened the ports, and save the TCP/UDP ports information to HTML file , XML file, or to tab-delimited text file.

CurrPorts also automatically mark with pink color suspicious TCP/UDP ports owned by unidentified applications (Applications without version information and icons)

Answer 4

The likely problem is that your process has started another (child) process which inherited the socket handle, and it is still running.

There are various ways to prevent this, for instance: ProcessStartInfo.UseShellExecute = true;

Answer 5

saw similar issue when root cause was some child process created inheriting the ports, parent process crashed, while child process still holding the port. Resolution was to identify the child process still running and stop it. In the example here the non existing process PID was 7336

> wmic process get processid,parentprocessid | findstr/i 7336
7336             23828

To stop this process:

> taskkill /f /pid 23828

And this resolved the issue.

Answer 6

Can you see the process in Process Explorer? If yes than you can kill it from there, but only after you investigate what it actually is (you can see all the dlls loaded into the process)

Answer 7

Try throwing a '-b' flag on your netstat command. It will tell you the name of the executable that is using the port. Then find that proc in task manager and kill it there. If that doesn't work post what the executable is that is holding the port open.

Answer 8

Need to mention the term linger here.

Details can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms739165.aspx

In brief: There's an option that tells the socket system to keep a socket open even after it has been closed if unsent data is present.

In your C# app you may specify any related options via Socket.SetSocketOption: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1011kecd.aspx

Since all the stuff mentioned is related to sending and clients, but we had similar issues at work, some further searching reveled that one could specify the linger option for listeners as shown in the example over here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/system.net.sockets.tcplistener.server.aspx

Some colleagues talked about ports being held by the OS after application termination/closing for about two minutes. Given that, it would be interesting to hear whether the port is still held after a certain amount of time.

Answer 9

I also encounter this issue. Finally I found my reason. It's caused by main process invoked a child process by popen in c/c++. But the main process crash/shutdown before invoking pclose. Then the port will treat the main process still live and still listen on it.

Answer 10

The problem can be caused if the dead process has started one or more child processes. If

BOOL WINAPI CreateProcess(
_In_opt_    LPCTSTR               lpApplicationName,
_Inout_opt_ LPTSTR                lpCommandLine,
_In_opt_    LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpProcessAttributes,
_In_opt_    LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpThreadAttributes,
_In_        BOOL                  bInheritHandles,
_In_        DWORD                 dwCreationFlags,
_In_opt_    LPVOID                lpEnvironment,
_In_opt_    LPCTSTR               lpCurrentDirectory,
_In_        LPSTARTUPINFO         lpStartupInfo,
_Out_       LPPROCESS_INFORMATION lpProcessInformation
);

was used to start a child process, it depends on the value of inherit handles, so with

bInheritHandles = false 

Windows will not block the port if the parent process is stopped and the client process is still running.

Answer 11

I don't suppose you have a firewall installed (or tried any Windows networking tweeks)?

Some firewalls exhibit this sort of behaviour and can keep ports open.

If you do have one, try disabling it and then launching your program and closing it and seeing what happens.

Answer 12

Since your process is listed as System, most likely you can kill it on a "System" command prompt. The System account has more privileges than a regular administrator.

You can a get "System" cmd.exe by scheduling a task for cmd.exe (the scheduler runs as System):

at 15:23 /interactive "cmd.exe" 

Change that time for something in the near future. Make sure as well you're on the machine console (if you are on a regular terminal server session, you won't see the new cmd.exe. Make mstsc login to the console). I guess there other ways to do that, but this worked for me in the past.

Answer 13

I had the same problem with xdebug, it left port 9000 open.

I managed to close with cmd using "taskkill /pid xxxx".

The pid of the process using the port can be retrieved with "netstat -o".

My configuration was win 7 home premium.

Answer 14

I had this same problem. The process was being debugged while it crashed, and there was still a vsjitdebugger.exe process in a suspended state lingering around, which apparently referred to the process being debugged. Killing that vsjitdebugger.exe process solved the problem.

Answer 15

I had the same problem and fixed it by :

• finding the PID with netstat -o
• Kill it with process xp

Interesting to note that netstat can sometimes return a pid but not the corresponding executable name !

Answer 16

A Hybrid use of TCPView and Process Explorer worked for me ;) I first looked in to the process id which was using the port in TCPView. Isolated the process in Process Explorer and killed the process using Process Explorer.