Abnormal behaviour of Defunct processes.


 
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Old 05-12-2009
Abnormal behaviour of Defunct processes.

Hi All,

Sorry to bother you all if my query is silly. Can you please clarify my doubts on defunct processes.
Actually coming to the scenario, i have a server which is under cluster environment. Server B is having problems with the defunct process. There was a cron scheduled on Server B which runs in a particular time on everyday and it runs only once in a day. The script calls some more scripts to collect system info executing comman OS level commands like prstat,sar etc... This scripts will be called via a specific port. When the scripts starts executing, normally 10-11 defunct processes will be created and will dissappear if the script complets its execution. But from couple of weeks its being sick to see that the defuncts created were creaping upto 1000+.
Also, a point of note: The defuncts will never appear on weekends i.e. saturday and sunday, even though scripts execute.
To ensure that the scripts are working fine, i went round the Server A and checked the scripts. I found no difference with them.
May i know why this is happening to Server B. Is there any performance issues with Server B?
Can anyone post in their ideas!!! what else i can check to solve this problem?Smilie
Many thanks in advance.Smilie

Cheers,
Sai
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preap(1)							   User Commands							  preap(1)

NAME
preap - force a defunct process to be reaped by its parent SYNOPSIS
preap [-F] pid... DESCRIPTION
A defunct (or zombie) process is one whose exit status has yet to be reaped by its parent. The exit status is reaped via the wait(3C), waitid(2), or waitpid(3C) system call. In the normal course of system operation, zombies may occur, but are typically short-lived. This may happen if a parent exits without having reaped the exit status of some or all of its children. In that case, those children are reparented to PID 1. See init(1M), which periodically reaps such processes. An irresponsible parent process may not exit for a very long time and thus leave zombies on the system. Since the operating system destroys nearly all components of a process before it becomes defunct, such defunct processes do not normally impact system operation. However, they do consume a small amount of system memory. preap forces the parent of the process specified by pid to waitid(3C) for pid, if pid represents a defunct process. preap will attempt to prevent the administrator from unwisely reaping a child process which might soon be reaped by the parent, if: o The process is a child of init(1M). o The parent process is stopped and might wait on the child when it is again allowed to run. o The process has been defunct for less than one minute. OPTIONS
The following option is supported: -F Forces the parent to reap the child, overriding safety checks. OPERANDS
The following operand is supported: pid Process ID list. EXIT STATUS
The following exit values are returned by preap, which prints the exit status of each target process reaped: 0 Successfully operation. non-zero Failure, such as no such process, permission denied, or invalid option. ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes: +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Availability |SUNWesu (32-bit) | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | |SUNWesxu (64-bit) | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ SEE ALSO
proc(1), init(1M), waitid(2), wait(3C), waitpid(3C), proc(4), attributes(5) WARNINGS
preap should be applied sparingly and only in situations in which the administrator or developer has confirmed that defunct processes will not be reaped by the parent process. Otherwise, applying preap may damage the parent process in unpredictable ways. SunOS 5.10 26 Mar 2001 preap(1)