In linux.debian.laptop, you wrote: >Hello, > > I have a problem with zombie processes on my laptop(debian woody). >Applications that seem to spawn child processes don't seem to get rid >off them when finnished, for example XMMS creates a process for every >track, but these never get killed, and just pile up until the system >process limit is hit. When the offending application is finnished the >zombie child processes are killed as well (by init?), but not before >then.
It's been a while. Have you solved the problem yet? > The problem only starts to occur a few hours after boot. Other friends >said it might be an issue with my kernel(custom 2.4.18), but I rebuilt >it from scratch (new kernel soruce) and that didn't help. > > I vaguely remember (I realize that's unhelpfull) this starting to occur >after I fiddled around with pcmcia-cs and wavelan to try and get my >wavelan card to work, I used versions of those packages that I compiled >my self, and recompiled the kernel as well to get it to work. Could this >be related, if so how might I go about trying to tell? I first encountered this problem about 1.5 years ago, on both my laptop and desktop. I downgraded both to testing from unstable - mainly to get libc back to the older version. I also removed a few packages, and my problems mysteriously dissapeared. The problem initially persisted across a large range of kernels - about 2.4.10 to 18 or so, IIRC. >I would be greatfull if anyone has any suggestsions/ ideas of where to >start looking? For the past few hours, I have been hacking on noflushd, trying to get it to talk to ext3 partitions (with little success so far - it *should* be working, in theory....) Then I gave up for the night, and noticed that I have all these zombies everywhere again. What have I not been using for the past 6 months, since the problem disappeared? noflushd. > 283 ? 00:00:11 xfs > 285 ? 00:00:10 noflushd > 294 ? 00:00:00 atd And then I notice you're running it too. Suspcicious. I wonder if the killing of a kernel thread (kupdated) - a process I always thought of as being rather clumsy, could be upsetting threaded applications. Just a random stab in the dark, but you may want to concider turning it off, rebooting, and seeing whether the problem is gone. -- TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/ Calm down, it's *only* ones and zeroes.
