If you’ve ever gotten to a point where installing RPMs in linux becomes unresponsive, unreliable and/or extremely flaky, you may need to dig a little deeper. Simply killing the yumex/yum/python processes may not be enough. Perhaps a reboot will do the trick, but when you run a server, any downtime whatsoever is unacceptable 99.9% of the time. Your next option–rebuild the RPM database. YUM will (should, rather) then function normally. Do so as stated: