Optimise system resources

[Achilles_2]

Hello folk,

Do anyone explain the below issue:
There are total 252 processes on the system, but it's running 46 processes only, other are always sleeping. According to the below figure, everything seems OK (50% CPU and 4G Memory free) and I don't think it is busy.
How come the servers doesn't ran those sleeping processes together. What's wrong exist the server? Do I need to fine tune some kernel parameters to improve this problem?

HP rx2660 with HPUX OS 11v2
Total 8 physical memory
nproc = 4200
maxuproc = 4100
max_thread_proc = 2000
nfile = 65536

From top command result
-----------------------

252 processes: 189 sleeping, 46 running, 17 zombies
Cpu states:
CPU LOAD USER NICE SYS IDLE BLOCK SWAIT INTR SSYS
0 2.79 17.6% 0.0% 15.0% 67.5% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
1 2.78 41.7% 0.0% 8.6% 49.7% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
--- ---- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
avg 2.78 29.7% 0.0% 11.8% 58.6% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%

Memory: 1887532K (1492016K) real, 2390096K (1759304K) virtual, 4118996K free Page# 1/6

Thanks,
Achilles

[Bill Hassell]

> 189 sleeping

Perfectly normal. There is nothing wrong with your system.

A sleeping process is one that has nothing to do and is waiting on some event to take place. These processes must start very quickly so they do not exit but remain ready to perform tasks as needed.

For example, here are some kernel memory management processes that sleep but will be started when necessary:

statdaemon unhashdaemon vhand swapper

DO not worry about sleeping processes -- they have been written to perform their tasks, one of which is to sleep.

> 17 zombies

Now there is a possible problem. Are all the root users familiar with kill -9 and the problems that -9 creates? A zombie is an orphan process which occurred because the parent process did not properly handle the child process's termination. Always use kill -15 to prevent corruption of files and databases, and use kill -9 only as a last resort.

[Dennis Handly]

>Bill: A zombie is an orphan process which occurred because the parent process did not properly handle the child process's termination.

A zombie is a zombie an orphan is an orphan, they are different. A kill -9 could create orphans but not zombies. (The rest is correct. :-)

Who is the zombie master (PPID) for those zombies?