Re: kill: cannot kill some processes
> > One thing about zombie process: Don't worry about trying to "make" them
go
> > away. They don't consume any CPU time, or any other resources other
than
> > the slot in the process table and the less than 1K of memory required to
> > hold their state information. They are not worth worrying about.
>
> Not entirely true. Init can inherit enough zombie processes that it
> hits its process limit (1024, if I remember correctly). Can you
> 'shutdown'? Nope. Not unless you can free up a slot. And if
> something's going haywire and spawning zombies quickly, this can be a
> problem.
>
> Not a common occurance, though...
Seconded, although for a different reason and based on an experience on
Solaris.
Right now on a big Solaris machine of mine I have about a dozen zombied
Perls--parent process (Apache) long gone, and when I -9ed them, their PPIDs
became 1 (init). Classic zombie.
Problem is, these Perls are running scripts off a software RAID, and thus
have it locked. This happened before--when I reboot the server to get rid of
the zombies, or some other reason, the filesystem won't unmount, won't get a
clean flag, and therefore will force fsck on reboot. As it's over 100GB, a
full fsck takes several hours.
Now maybe there's something I don't know to recover from this cleanly, or
maybe Linux handles it a different way, but it seems like this is an example
of zombies causing a real problem. If anyone knows a way around it, I'd be
real grateful!
c
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