lots of Zombie Processes on Vaio PCG-Z600LEK

Tim Connors

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Mar 28, 2003, 3:40:21 PM3/28/03

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In linux.debian.laptop, you wrote:
>Hello,
>
> I have a problem with zombie processes on my laptop(debian woody).
>Applications that seem to spawn child processes don't seem to get rid
>off them when finnished, for example XMMS creates a process for every
>track, but these never get killed, and just pile up until the system
>process limit is hit. When the offending application is finnished the
>zombie child processes are killed as well (by init?), but not before
>then.

It's been a while. Have you solved the problem yet?

> The problem only starts to occur a few hours after boot. Other friends
>said it might be an issue with my kernel(custom 2.4.18), but I rebuilt
>it from scratch (new kernel soruce) and that didn't help.
>
> I vaguely remember (I realize that's unhelpfull) this starting to occur
>after I fiddled around with pcmcia-cs and wavelan to try and get my
>wavelan card to work, I used versions of those packages that I compiled
>my self, and recompiled the kernel as well to get it to work. Could this
>be related, if so how might I go about trying to tell?

I first encountered this problem about 1.5 years ago, on both my
laptop and desktop. I downgraded both to testing from unstable -
mainly to get libc back to the older version. I also removed a few
packages, and my problems mysteriously dissapeared. The problem
initially persisted across a large range of kernels - about 2.4.10 to
18 or so, IIRC.

>I would be greatfull if anyone has any suggestsions/ ideas of where to
>start looking?

For the past few hours, I have been hacking on noflushd, trying to get
it to talk to ext3 partitions (with little success so far - it
*should* be working, in theory....)

Then I gave up for the night, and noticed that I have all these zombies everywhere again. What have I not been using for the past 6 months, since the problem disappeared? noflushd.

> 283 ? 00:00:11 xfs
> 285 ? 00:00:10 noflushd
> 294 ? 00:00:00 atd

And then I notice you're running it too. Suspcicious.

I wonder if the killing of a kernel thread (kupdated) - a process I
always thought of as being rather clumsy, could be upsetting threaded
applications. Just a random stab in the dark, but you may want to
concider turning it off, rebooting, and seeing whether the problem is
gone.

--
TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/

Calm down, it's *only* ones and zeroes.

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Neill Smith

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Mar 28, 2003, 4:10:05 PM3/28/03

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Tim Connors wrote:

>In linux.debian.laptop, you wrote:
>
>
>It's been a while. Have you solved the problem yet?
>
>

Hello,

No, I gave up after a few weeks, and re-installed. The problem has
re-occured once since then, and I gave up and ran Mandrake (but notably
not noflushd) :-( I'll let people know if I get into the situation again
and noflushd seems to be involved. Thanks for letting me know, I'd given
up hope on anyone attempting to look for a solution, but am glad to see
someone else has had the problem.

thanks again,

Neill

Obi

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Mar 28, 2003, 10:40:10 PM3/28/03

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hello there,

well I have the same problem, mainly with xmms. I have a laptop, use
noflushd when I'm not on AC and I'm running 2.4.20 modified for my
Fujitsu P2110.

Well, after having read your email, I decided to ditch noflusd to see if
things improved and so far (knock on wood) no defunct yet. It's been
only 6-7 hours, but usually I see defunct pretty consistently when I use
xmms.

I'm running sid.

graziano