How to find and clear zombie processes w/o rebooting?

Daniel B. Thurman dant at cdkkt.com
Thu Jun 26 02:01:47 UTC 2008


Cameron Simpson wrote:
>
> On 25Jun2008 18:33, Daniel B. Thurman <dant at cdkkt.com> wrote:
> > Using F8, I have found that Nautilus sometimes hangs and
> > runs at 100% CPU.  Force killing Nautilus's drive windows
> > was the only way to recover.  I am not sure that force killing
> > this drive window is related to the zombie that I founding using
> > top.
> > I also discovered that my swap was increased to 2GB of 4GB
> > and has stayed there ever since.
>
> Zombies are just process slots of exit()ed processes awaiting collection.
> They do not consume CPU time or swap space.
>
> > So before I accuse Nautilus as being the zombie process, how
> > do I locate it using ps or some other tool to find out what is
> > going on and to what process the zombie was?
>
> Zombies are in the Z state. They are exited programs whose parents have
> not called wait() to collect the exit status.
>
> > In the same breadth, is there a way to clear zombie processes
> > without being forced to reboot the system which would certainly
> > remove the zombie process and clear the swap space?
>
> Removing zombies will do NOTHING about your swap space, since they are
> not consuming it. (Of course a reboot will clear the swap, as it does
> everything else.)
>
> They only way to clear a zombies process slot (which is all a zombie
> process actually is) is to find the zombie's parent process (using ps'
> "f" (forest) option, for example, or just looking at the PPID column)
> and either causing the parent to do a wait() for the zombie if possible,
> or to kill the parent (which will cause the zombies to be inherited by
> process 1, which will then wait() for it, cleaning it up).
>
> Zombies are essentially untidy but harmless. They are not eating you
> machine's brains (ram/swap/cpu).
>
> Cheers,
> -- 
> Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
> http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/
>
> Zombies don't get pumped.       - Jake, in rec.climbing
>
I like your signature ;)

I did a ps aux | grep Z :
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
dant      3902  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    Jun24   0:00 
[Xsession] <defunct>

Um - ok.  Something "burped" with the Xsession.  Wonder what happened.

I noticed that my system became slightly sluggish and I have no clue what is
causing it.  I do know that a reboot will bring the system into a 
'snappy' state
and my script that converts ape to mp3 and splits mp3 with a provided cue
file and it really rips.  But then over the last few days, it started 
slowing down
quite noticeably.

Ah- I think I will just do it the BGM$ way: just hit "reset" :D

Thanks for the pointer,
Dan


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