<defunct> 2

[Sonk]

We have been showing a process marked <defunct> now for a week. I have not been able to find any information on this. I can not remove it with the kill command. Do we simply have to live with it?

 

[bjverzal]

<defunct> AKA &quot;Zombie&quot;.

This is a process that had it's parent process die, but did not clean up properly. There is nothing you can do to clean them up except reboot.

A zombie process takes no system resources except an entry in the process table. It is not using any CPU or memory resources that would be measurable.

Bill.

 

[vickersdc]

Just to further clarify Bill's note...

A defunct process is created after a child process terminates and informs the parent process that this has happened.

At this stage, the child process entry is not cleared out of the process table until the parent process terminates normally (as it may be required).

The problem comes after the child process has terminated, if the parent process is abnormally terminated. The child process then becomes owned by the init process - even though there is nothing to own. The entry in the process table therefore remains as init has nothing to control.

Hope it helps.
Cheers,
Dave V.

 

[d3funct]

The problem with a large number of <defunct>/zombie processes is that should your process table fill you will not be able to fork more processes and you will begin to experience system instability. If a particular user is the owner of a number of <defunct> processes they may not be able to continue work because they will have reached their alloted number of processes and can't fork more. d3funct
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