From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Apr 12 2:10:42 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from chippie.cgu.nl (chippie.cgu.nl [145.101.220.7]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C3CE3154D6 for ; Mon, 12 Apr 1999 02:10:38 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from psd@cgu.nl) Received: from localhost (psd@localhost) by chippie.cgu.nl (8.9.3/8.9.3/psd) with SMTP id LAA17438; Mon, 12 Apr 1999 11:11:19 +0200 (CEST) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 11:11:19 +0200 (CEST) From: Paul Dekkers X-Sender: psd@chippie.cgu Reply-To: Paul Dekkers To: Stefano Riva Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: HELP: Why all those zombie's? In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19990412101512.0095f350@relay.alice.it> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Mon, 12 Apr 1999, Stefano Riva wrote: | At 09.44 12/04/99 +0200, you wrote: | >I ran top, and suddenly I saw: | >321 processes: 1 running, 24 sleeping, 1 stopped, 295 zombie | >AW! Why all those zombie's? I still see processes from some days ago in | >ps auxww, is a reboot the only method? (And won't it occur again?) | >The box is running 3.0R and is a 486 with 40MB's of ram. | | You have to identify those processes. Are they all instances of the same | program? If so, who's the parent of that program (i.e. where is it started | from)? | A zombie is a process that has died, but its slot in the process table | has not been released, probably because the parent has blocked without | doing a proper "wait". The processes were as well sendmail, sh, pine, and so on, so that's a little strange: not one specific parent. Can't check this anymore because the power failed, but I'm afraid it will reoccur :-( Paul -- Paul Dekkers E-Mail: To err is human, to moo bovine To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message