topic Low performance of HP Unix 11i machine in Operating System - HP-UX

Low performance of HP Unix 11i machine

contactvenky2005 — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 01:49:28 GMT

When i run top command and check the performance of an unix machine, i am able to find 14 zombies processes running. Will it be the reason for slow performance of my machine?. If so, Suggest me how to kill the zombie processes.

Re: Low performance of HP Unix 11i machine

Torsten. — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 01:56:51 GMT

You cannot kill a zombie - it is already dead.

The only solution is a reboot.

Re: Low performance of HP Unix 11i machine

RAC_1 — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 01:59:04 GMT

That might be or might not be the reason for performance problem. You can not kill zombies. They are like dead processes, waiting on some i/os.

With glance, do you see any of the resources hitting maximum-cpu, disk, memory etc?

Re: Low performance of HP Unix 11i machine

James R. Ferguson — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 08:38:01 GMT

Hi:

As noted, you can't kill a 'zombie' process. As the name implies, it's already dead!

Zombies arise when a parent process fails to ignore its child's termination or fails to wait on its child.

Zombie processes consume a slot in the kernel's process table (whose limits are governed by the kernel tunable, 'nproc') but otherwise do no harm. They don't consume memory nor processor cyclces. At worst, you waste potential slots in the process table for allocating new processes.

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: Low performance of HP Unix 11i machine

Bill Hassell — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 21:07:18 GMT

zombies or defunct processes are the result of imporper handling of parent-child programs. Byt the 14 zombies have no effect on performance. You need to identify why you think it is slow. For instance, did the system run faster in the past? Or is the system being compared to another system? Performance problems require an understanding of what is normal for the application programs in terms of disk I/O, LAN, memory and CPU usage.

Re: Low performance of HP Unix 11i machine

Steven E. Protter — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 01:09:12 GMT

Shalom,

Zombies aren't really doing anything.

First you try a kill

If that fails kill -9

If that fails only a system boot will fix them.

You clearly have an application problem and need to track the processes back to the application and deal with the vendor or programmers involved.

SEP

Re: Low performance of HP Unix 11i machine

contactvenky2005 — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 01:56:52 GMT

thankx a lot. The replies were really helpful to me. As it was sugested there was no problem with zombie process, ather it was with i/o from disk