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Re: Zombie processes



Sagi Shporer wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> > I'm running my system for just four days non-stop, and I already have two
> > zombie processes, both of them are modprobe. Here's one of them:
> > 20887  ?  Z    0:00 (modprobe <zombie>)
> > Why do they appear? How can I kill them? kill and kill -9 don't seem to
> > help.
> Zombie processes is the left over of a dead process, the idea is that the
> parent process can get information from those zombie processes. You can
> find it in any type of UNIX machine, and in any case it should bother you
> too much, they should die with their parent.

Usually, a couple of processes over 4 days period is OK.  But they
still occupy a slot in the process table (though all the other
system resources used by them are freed), and if you have many
of them then it might be a cause for concern ("many" is a function of
the size of the process table (default for 2.0 kernels seems to be 512)
and the total number of processes currently in the system (usually
around 100))

Cheers,

--Amos


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