Safe kill procedure

kill pid (sends a TERM, wait 5 seconds)
kill pid (yes, try again, wait 5 seconds)
kill -INT pid (wait for it)
kill -INT pid (damn, still not dead?)
kill -KILL pid (same thing as -9)
kill -KILL pid (something is wrong)

If the process is still running, then stop sending it signals. It's either stuck in I/O wait or it's Defunct. 'ps auxw | grep processname', if you see it's in state D, then kill its parent process (the 3rd column of 'ps -ef' is the parent pid). If it's in I/O wait, then you have a deeper system problem. Most home users will never have this problem.

Credit to Hawkwind