Re: too many DEFUNCT processes

[Gordon Messmer <yinyang eburg com>]

On Fri, 2002-09-27 at 13:05, Bruno Negrao wrote:
> I have a RedHat 6.2 and it isn't working fine. Look at how many defunct
> processes are hanging around:
...
> Does somenone could explain why is it happening?
> 
> And the worst is that the parent processes of all this defunct childs still
> remain in the system - with a T (stopped) status.

It's happening because the parent is stopped  ;)

Give the parent a CONT(inue) signal to make it start again:
kill -CONT <parent-pid>

If that doesn't fix it, consider killing the parent with signal 9, and
restarting it.

If the parent is the init process (I've seen it happen once, and was
probably related to glibc upgrade), you'll have to sync and power off to
reboot.