gnomerc = zombie

[Mike Waychison]

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David J Patrick wrote:
> My home system (Mandrake 10, gnome 2.4, on a pIII 500mhz w. 512ram) has
> been acting sluggish lately, with Evolution 1.4 hanging regularly.  I
> went to "top", to see what was eating my resources, or otherwise slowing
> things down, and the only suspect I spotted was
> 3580 djp       16   0     0    0    0 Z  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 gnomerc
> <defunct>
> a zombie !
> 
> what is that and how do I kill it ?
> stake throught the heart ?
> cut it's head RIGHT OFF ?
> 

In posix, when a process dies, its resources are released, but the
process stays around as a zombie with its exit state info (why it died /
exit code) until the parent process gets around to calling wait(2) (or
variant thereof).

If you see a zombie process that isn't going away, chances are 99.9% if
you blame it on a software bug of the parent process not checking the
deaths of its children.

Also, when a process dies, all of its children processes get re-parented
to process at pid == 1 (init(8)), which in turn reaps any children that
die.  The likelyhood that init(8) isn't doing its job is very low,
unless of course if you substituted it for your own.

So the easiest way to get rid of the zombie is to identify its parent
('ps auxf' works well enough) and kill it.

I'd be more suspect of any processes that are in a 'D' or
'uninterruptible sleep' (aka 'D'isk sleep) state.

HTH,

Mike Waychison
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