You should never terminate atop by 'kill -9', because then it has no chance to stop process accounting; as a result the accounting file may consume a lot of disk space after a while!!!
Lets do this smoothly:
systemctl stop atopd systemctl disable atopd Check atop processes ps auxfS |grep atop Kill if any using 'kill -15' kill -15 PID
Check for links and unlink if any:
ls /etc/systemd/system/ |grep atop
Remove atopd.service file rm -fv /usr/lib/systemd/system/atopd.service or rm -fv /usr/lib/systemd/system/atop.service Enter /tmp/atop.d/ where the file atop.acct shouldn't be increasing any longer cd /tmp/atop.d/ If so, go ahead and remove it rm -rf /tmp/atop.d/ systemctl daemon-reload systemctl reset-failed Should be empty: systemctl list-units |grep atop
In case you've got a server where atop had been removed incorrectly you will need to reinstall atop and do the steps above
Useful URLs:
https://linux.die.net/man/1/atop
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/systemd
https://superuser.com/questions/513159/how-to-remove-systemd-services