topic Re: Kill Defunct in Operating System - HP-UX

Kill Defunct

Ken Lee_1 — Wed, 26 Sep 2001 00:39:02 GMT

How am I going to kill this process? I have tried kill -9, kill -15, kill -24 for both PID and PPID but still the user is still there. Besides rebooting the server how can I get rid of this? Thank you in advance.

abc 11753 11700 0 Sep 25 ? 0:00

Re: Kill Defunct

Victor_5 — Wed, 26 Sep 2001 00:52:37 GMT

Hi Ken:

Defunct is a Zombie process.

In most of the case, you have to reboot the system to remove the process. However, you still have other options in some speciai cases, see my post for details.

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x69601012aa92d5118ff10090279cd0f9,00.html

Re: Kill Defunct

someone_4 — Wed, 26 Sep 2001 00:54:29 GMT

Hello Ken ..
The answer is no you cant kill them because they are already dead. And the only way to get rid of them is to reboot. Here are 2 links that have allot more information if this is not enough do a search on defunct.
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x26d0f841489fd4118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0xa26e87dc4d7dd5118ff00090279cd0f9,00.html

Richard

Re: Kill Defunct

Sanjay_6 — Wed, 26 Sep 2001 01:56:12 GMT

Hi Ken,

As the others have already told you, a defunct process cannot be killed. Only a reboot solves the problem. Here are some threads for you to look at.

http://us-support2.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=f4c7615c0f5d92b756/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000006340486

http://us-support2.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=f4c7615c0f5d92b756/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000019779201

http://us-support2.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=f4c7615c0f5d92b756/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000047673943

So either live with it or reboot the box.

Hope this helps.

thanks

Re: Kill Defunct

Frank Slootweg — Wed, 26 Sep 2001 11:04:59 GMT

I know the question was answered, but I wanted to add some extra information (which may or may not be in the referenced threads):

> abc 11753 11700 0 Sep 25 ? 0:00

In this example, 11700 is the problem process, i.e. the parent of the process.

A parent should wait for its children. If the parent does not wait for its children, the children become zombies/ when they (the children) terminate.

Sometimes it helps to send 'the right' signal (NOT -9/kill) to the parent process in order for it to wake up and wait on its children.

For details, see "zombie process" in glossary(9) ("man glossary").

Re: Kill Defunct

Scott Van Kalken — Wed, 26 Sep 2001 21:34:29 GMT

I agree with Frank.

We quite often get defunct processess with Oracle's Concurrent managers. If we send a HUP or a SIGCHLD to the PPID it usually cleans up the defunct processes.

Other times it doesn't.

We know wht causes it, but are yet to find a way of avoiding them.