Best practice to identify and kill hanging process, when system hangs and reacts slowly on user input?

Posted by NES on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by NES
Published on 2011-01-03T16:26:44Z Indexed on 2011/01/03 16:58 UTC
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ubuntu-desktop

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process

Recently when I tried to open a video with VLC, my system slowed down, the open applications webbrowser, VLC and filemanager and others didn't react any longer. The mouse just reacted still very slowly.

On a windows machine i would press a keycombi CTRL-ALT-DEL to open the taskmanager, search the process which caused the hang and kill it.

Since i'm fairly new with the use of linux i haven't figured out the best practice for solve such a situation in Ubuntu.

Which quick and effective way would you recommend to identify the hanging process and close it, when the system already reacts very slowly on user input?

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