The terminate() method from the multiprocessing.Process class offers a way to quickly terminate a process. When the method is called, exit handlers, finally causes, or similar resources that are specified in the Process class or an overridden class will not be executed. However, descendant processes of the terminated process will not be terminated. These processes are known as orphaned processes.

Although terminating processes is sometimes frowned upon, it is sometimes necessary because some processes interact with interprocess-communication resources, such as locks, semaphores, pipes, or queues, and forcibly stopping those processes is likely to cause those resources to become corrupted or unavailable to other processes. If, however, the processes in your program never interact with the aforementioned resources, the terminate() method is considerably useful, especially if a process appears to be unresponsive or deadlocked.

One thing to note when using the terminate() method is that, even though the Process object is effectively killed after calling the method, it is important that you call join() on the object as well. Since the alive status of Process objects is sometimes not immediately updated after the terminate() method, this practice gives the background system an opportunity to implement the update itself to reflect the termination of the processes.