03-13-2008
zombie processes and hung process termination
Is there a way I can run a command that will run in the kernel or in the memory and automatically kill certain scripts if they get to <defunct> processes, without having to be monitoring the server manually?
I have a Perl script which runs for 20k members and normally does not have any problems, but today, like 8 times I seen an overload of processes that just seemed to 'hang' there with the same pid number and script name, and a few of them had <defunct> running there.
I have heard of something called a kill daemon, but don't know where to find details on how to program it.
Here is an example of what I seen:
Pid Owner Priority Cpu % Mem % Command
4613 username 0 29.0 1.0 perl -w web.cgi
4614 username 0 17.0 0.2 perl -w index.cgi
4616 username 0 27.0 0.0 [web.cgi] <defunct>
15519 username 0 0.1 0.0 perl -w web.cgi
15520 username 0 0.1 0.0 perl -w web.cgi
15521 username 0 0.1 0.0 perl -w web.cgi
15523 username 0 0.1 0.0 perl -w web.cgi
15535 username 0 0.1 0.0 perl -w web.cgi
15559 username 0 0.1 0.0 perl -w web.cgi
among other things
when that happened, the script web.cgi did not load, when it did, it took like 10 minutes to load! Crazy...
Normally we have no problems, so I ran a trace on a few of the pid processes.
I cannot tell what was causing the overload.
right now there appear to be 39 people on the website and no problems the processes are popping in and out as they should...
Anyhow I would appreciate any advice anyone can offer.
Thank you much,
Richard
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LEARN ABOUT OPENSOLARIS
killall
killall(1M) System Administration Commands killall(1M)
NAME
killall - kill all active processes
SYNOPSIS
/usr/sbin/killall [signal]
DESCRIPTION
killall is used by shutdown(1M) to kill all active processes not directly related to the shutdown procedure.
killall terminates all processes with open files so that the mounted file systems will be unbusied and can be unmounted.
killall sends signal (see kill(1)) to the active processes. If no signal is specified, a default of 15 is used.
The killall command can be run only by the super-user.
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
| ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
|Availability |SUNWcsu |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
SEE ALSO
kill(1), ps(1), fuser(1M), shutdown(1M), signal(3C), attributes(5)
SunOS 5.11 14 Sep 1992 killall(1M)