William T Wilson wrote: > > On Thu, 22 Feb 2001, brian moore wrote: > > > > does the process list "Z" under STAT ? if it is the process has gone > > > zombied and i don't think there is much you can do. sometimes zombie'd > > > processes die on their own eventually many times they will not die until > > > you reboot .. > > > > Not quite true... zombies don't ever die: they're already dead. > > While the description of zombie processes is accurate, I think another > likely situation is that the process is in "uninterruptible sleep," i.e. > the 'D' state. This happens when a process is blocked in a system call - > it will be 'D' until the kernel function returns. Kernel bugs, hardware > problems, and dead NFS mounts can cause these kernel functions to take > a long time or forever. > > In such a case, you really are stuck; unless the resource the process is > waiting for frees up, it's going to hang around until a reboot. > > 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... -Ron- GPG and other info at: http://www.yellowbank.com/
