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Re: Best way to locate and kill a zombie

 
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Sridhar Bhaskarla
Honored Contributor

Re: Best way to locate and kill a zombie

Hi John,

It is still not a real zombie as it's parent it not yet "1", init - the God mother of all processes.

Now try "ps -ef|grep 2718" and see what process is listed?.

A zombie that is attached to init, cannot be killed. They are ghosts waiting to send their status information to their parents that do not exist. So, a good programmer can write a code that will get the status from the waiting child. Once the status is reported, the child will literally die.

If the zombies are not talking too much of CPU (sometimes users report that the defunct process is consuming too much CPU, by misunderstanding how Glance reports), then I will wait for my next maintenance window.


-Sri
You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try
John Jimenez
Super Advisor

Re: Best way to locate and kill a zombie

# ps -ef |grep 2718
root 2718 1 0 Feb 15 ? 0:00 /opt/perf/bin/perflbd
root 3047 2718 3 Feb 15 ? 0:00
root 2733 2718 0 Feb 15 ? 0:57 /opt/perf/bin/rep_server -t SCOo
root 10180 969 2 09:54:37 ttyvb 0:00 grep 2718

Yes it looks like the parent is "1". it does taking any proccessing, but if I have time I will try and find a script, just in case one pops up in the future that does take up processing time. thanks again....
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Pete Randall
Outstanding Contributor

Re: Best way to locate and kill a zombie

John,

The point is that if the parent is not init (PID 1), the "zombie" can be killed by killing off the parent (in your case 2718). I'm not sure what perfldb is and therefore, I'm not sure this is something you want to do, but it's something to remember for next time.

Pete

Pete
Sridhar Bhaskarla
Honored Contributor

Re: Best way to locate and kill a zombie

If you can afford to stop Measureware on your system, do a mwa stop and see what happens by running ps -ef. That should stop perflbd process. You can do a mwa start later to start that process.

This may probably make it a real zombie. If you are lucky, then it may kill it too.

-Sri
You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try
Marco Santerre
Honored Contributor

Re: Best way to locate and kill a zombie

perflbd is part of your MeasureWare software. So to try and kill you rdefunct process I would suggest to try and stop MeasureWare and restart it. That way the paretn process will stop and hopefully terminate its child too.

/sbin/init.d/mwa stop
/sbin/init.d/mwa start
Cooperation is doing with a smile what you have to do anyhow.
John Jimenez
Super Advisor

Re: Best way to locate and kill a zombie

Yes I figured where this came from a few minutes ago. I installed the diagnostic tools over the weekend and had some problems because I did not stop measureware while doing swinstall the first time.

Awesome stopping and starting measureware again did the trick, the zombie disapeared... :)
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