[plug] defunct process won't die

[David Griffiths]

>> Thanks for the help Steve.
>>
>> >    21989 ?        DW     0:24 [netscape-commun]
>> >    21999 ?        Z      0:00 [netscape-commun <defunct>]
>>
>> the ppid for 21999 is 21989
>> and ppid for 21989 is 1   as you suspected.
>>
>> However a
>>     kill -HUP 1
>> does it's thing OK, but still leaves the two gremlin processess around.
>> (kill -s SIGHUP 1 complains about "s" being an unknown signal).
>>
>> Any further ideas very welcome!
>
>A couple of thoughts:
>
>pid 21989 is in a state of "uninterruptable sleep" with no pages in resident
>memory (DW) - ie it's not a zombie, which explains why a HUP to init
>didn't clean it up (pid 21999 *is* a zombie (Z) and killing 21989 should get
>rid of it) BUT
>
>Use top to tell you which process is in a runaway state (on my Mandrake
>system, when Netscape spaks, it's glibc20 which runs away with itself, hence
>my suggestion to grep the ps output for glibc20) and kill it. If that
>didn't clear the sleeping and zombie processes, then kill -HUP 1 should at
>this point. (kill -s is a BSD'ism, which is probably why it returned an error)
>
>Steve

Hmm... top doesn't throw up anything interesting that I can see (X, kvt and
top are the only processes taking up any cpu and they total about 2 %). The
glibc process isn't present at all in a ps and I can't see anything else
that looks like a runaway process, although my wmmon icon shows significant
(almost constant) activity - it must have some aggregate measure of load.

Might have to reboot and (sob) destroy my uptime :-(

re the kill -s, from the man page it looks like it should work, must be out
of date.


By the way the system is an upraded Red Hat 6.1.

cheers.



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  David Griffiths                             griffith at environ.wa.gov.au

  Air Quality Management Branch
  Department of Environmental Protection          Phone:   61 8 9222 7151

  Westralia Square                                Fax  :   61 8 9321 5184
  141 St Georges Tce
  Perth 6000
  Western Australia
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