Are you sure this is the problem

There could be processes/daemons which are just sleeping but essential for the keeping the system sane. Killing this as root could have disastrous effects. For example, if you are in GUI and have running a lot of programs like browsers, messengers, document editors, mail clients, etc...... If you just run a "ps -aux" command on the terminal and no other IO activity, then your system could show all the process sleeping and just your "ps -aux" as running. Kill all the sleeping process is bring the system to a halt.