In Chapter 19, we discussed the concept of deadlock. This can happen when two processes are each trying to acquire locks on the resources held by the other. Neither process will release the lock it currently holds, and thus neither can acquire a lock on the second resource it desires.

This scenario is a very good candidate for code that might lead to a hanging process. Since usually the deadlock cannot be resolved without manual intervention, the two processes will hang, doing nothing and wasting system resources, while trying to acquire locks.

An infinite loop might lead to a hanging process as well. Moreover, such a loop will usually consume a lot of CPU resources and memory. You should be very careful when using while and similar loop constructs that are capable of creating endless loops.

A process relying on some external resource, for example when accessing a file over NFS, might hang if the mounted partition it tries to access is not available. Usually it takes a long time before the request times out, and in the meantime the process may hang.

There are many other reasons that a process might hang, but these are some of the most common.