Re: kill: cannot kill some processes
>>>>> "William" == William T Wilson <fluffy@snurgle.org> writes:
William> One thing about zombie process: Don't worry about trying
William> to "make" them go away. They don't consume any CPU time,
William> or any other resources other than the slot in the process
William> table and the less than 1K of memory required to hold
William> their state information. They are not worth worrying
William> about.
My understanding is that zombie processes occur when the task dies,
but the parent hasn't called waitpid(...) on that process yet.
The Linux kernel needs to keep track of the process so it can return
the processes status, in case the parent does call waitpid(...).
If you see a zombie persist, then the parent process is probably slow
or buggy, as it has not yet done the right thing.
Of course, you could argue that the penalty is small, but IMHO, it is
still a bug if the parent doesn't clean up after its children.
--
Brian May <bam@debian.org>
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