You cannot get rid of a zombie with kill and a termination signal. It is already dead, to keep the metaphor going.
Zombies are un-waited for child processes.
Instead find the parent of the process, and issue
This is not necessarily safe nor will it always work, if you want the parent to keep on running. The parent process signal mask could be set to terminate on SIGCHLD or do nothing. The default action for SIGCHLD is ign. The next step is to
if the parent can be killed off.
As jim stated, a zombie process is already dead. It has already exited. Any files it opened have been closed. Any memory it allocated has been freed. Aside from its entry in the process table, its not consuming any resources. So, if you only have a few of them, it's probably not worth killing the parent or rebooting.
Again, as jim stated, zombies are the result of a parent not looking after its children. If the parent's code is under your control, you should improve it with the appropriate wait calls. If it is not, you should file a bug report with the author.
If you killed the parent and it has exited, and if the zombie process is still hanging around, then it is not a zombie process (which wouldn't suprse me because "zombie" is an often misused term).
Provide two reports of the "zombie" processes and their parents, one before and one after killing a parent, using a ps format which at the very least includes uid, pid, ppid, and stat. Also, include the output of the id command when run by the same user that kills the parent.
We need to see the output of ps -ef showing the parent and the zombie(s). If you actually terminated the parent, the zombies would also "go away" in a few minutes. If you terminated another non-parent then, no, the zombies will remain.
What is the overhead associated with zombie process?Is it running out of process-ID?:confused:
Since some information is stored in process table..
Thanks in Advance (4 Replies)
Dear Bos,
I have one server,everday if I check with command TOP always present zombie,like below:
last pid: 4578; load averages: 0.15, 0.11, 0.13 07:56:15
298 processes: 295 sleeping, 1... (10 Replies)
Is there an equivilant to the preap command in AIX that would allow me to get rid of a zombie process. I am new to AIX, moving over from Solaris and in the past I have been able to preap the pid on the defunct process to clean them up. I have looked around and the best I can see is that it may... (3 Replies)
dear friends,
in an interview they asked me what is zombie process. how we can identifying these process.if can you kill all zombie process. (8 Replies)
Hi
I need help because I don't know if it is possible to add a find inside a cat.
like I have a file with the pid of the process that use to became zombie. And I have the same pid stored in the var (pid1)
now, I have no clue how to check if the the find finds the pid or even if it's... (2 Replies)
I have RHES4 machine with VRTSralus - Backup Exec agent installed there and running as a service. The agent hiccups sometimes and turns into defunct state. The problem is that I cannot kill it anyway., it stays there forever until the machine is rebooted. I wonder if anyone had such an experience... (1 Reply)
hi!
i am writing a c program which has the following structure:
main()
{
child1
child1.1
child2
child2.1
}
the child1.1 and 2.1 are becoming zombies...
how can i handle this...
thanx (1 Reply)