Defunct processes using all the CPU

[Mott Given]

A lot of defunct processes (shown below) associated with an Oracle database application were using all the CPU on a T-600 with 8 CPU's. I thought a defunct process was a zombie process that used no CPU time. The software that I am using, BMC's Patrol for UNIX Perform Predict was reporting that the defunct processes were using all the CPU time - is this a measurement error from the Patrol data? Also why would so many processes crash like this at the same time?
"/usr/bin/sh \./process_award_idx\.sh"
"cat testdata\.lst"
"cut -f6 -d\*"
"cut -f8 -d|"
"cut -f9 -d|"
"diff /dla_pr/rep_ecf3/020705/abstract/Abstract_d_YPE02158000"
"grep -n \^N1\\\* 850stsegs0001"
"grep -v FREIGHT"
"grep \\\*BD\\\*"
"grep \\\*ST\\\*"
"grep \\\*XE\\\*"
"grep \^N1\\\* 850stsegs0001"
"grep \^NTE\\\* 850stsegs0001"
"grep \^PER\\\* 850stsegs0001"
"grep \^REF\\\* 850stsegs0001"
"process_sol_seed process_sol_seed"
"pwd"
"sed -n 12p 850stsegs0001"
"sed -n 16p 850stsegs0004"
"sed -n 18p 850stsegs0001"

Mott Given

[Pete Randall]

Hi Mott,

I've seen similar situations where defunct processes were consuming massive amounts of cpu time. At this point, you need to get rid of them. If they have a parent PID of 1, the only way to clear them out is to reboot. If the PPID is other than 1, you can try killing the parent.


Pete

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

Can you kill those process??

ps -ef | grep defunct would give you list of defunct process and most of them should be having a ? and 1 under ppid showing as a runaway process.

Kill the process and see it makes any difference.
The following command would show you top 10 cpu intensive process
UNIX95= ps -e -o "vsz pcpu ruser pid stime time state args" | sort -rn |head -10

Goodluck,
-USA..