identifying defunc/unwanted processes

[PROSANJIT MALLICK]

Hi everybody,
Recently I have come across processes that show ? in tty col of TOP. These processes doesnt belong to
root. These are shown against other logins. Does it
means that this processes have become defunc.
Is it OK to kill such processes as some times it shows in first row of TOP.
What does these ? marks denotes ???
Can someone shed some light on this ?
thanking in advance
Prosanjit

[Vincenzo Restuccia]

See http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x5fa4ee3e323bd5118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

[Jared Westgate_1]

Hello,

I too have this problem on my 11.0 system. On my HP-UX 10.2 system, there were no ?. After talking to the response center, the basic answer I got was that there is nothing wrong with it. They told me that the processes either didn't have a tty, or it was actually unknown by the system. Strange, huh?

Most of the processes I have running right now have the ? in the tty column. It doesn't appear to hurt anything. These processes (at least on my system) are NOT defunct! If there is a problem with the process it will show it in the State column (ie, zombie).

I'm not sure what the difference between a defunct process and a zombie are, but you can see defunct processes with a "ps -ef | grep defunct"

Also, if you do have zombies, you don't necessarily have to reboot. I have an oracle database running on my system, and it occasionally creates zombies when the concurrent managers are not shut down properly. All I have to do is restart the concurrent managers and it clears out all the zombies.

I'm definately not expert, but I hope this information helps.

Jared

[PROSANJIT MALLICK]

Hi,
today I had two processes which were utilising 90 % of the %CPU and %WCPU. I checked up with the programmer who confirmed that it was unusual as the said programs used to get over within 10 mins and are very short shells.
We looked up everything but was unable to find anything wrong. ps -el of the process id showed it to be running.
As the processes where eating up all resources I had to kill the process.

Is there any place where I can get details as to what should be done in such cases ?

Prosanjit

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi
If you have what appears to be runaway processes, you must try to identify what they are doing and where they came from.

I use a small script that touches a file in my sysadmin dir then sends results of a system search to it. This allows me to run this script which is far quicker that me typing the commands, cat the file and decide weather or not it is a runaway and where and who created it.

file format is:-

touch /sysadmin/runner
top -d 3 >> /sysadmin/runner
ps -ef >> /sysadmin/runner
who -u >> /sysadmin/runner
who -TDpd >> /sysadmin/runner

Add what ever elso you might need to know.

HTH

Paula

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi
Sorry line:-

who -TDpd >> /sysadmin/runner

should read:-

who -THpd >> /sysadmin/runner

Paula

[Bill Hassell]

It is fairly common for processes to lose their tty connection and start consuming lots of CPU time--it the process was communicating over the network and the user trashed the connection. Normally, a SIGHUP signal is sent to such processes, but this is not the case for Xwindows, and made worse by PeeCees emulating an Xterminal, then crash. This will leave Xwindow programs hung. Not much you can do except to rewrite the program to test for the validity of the display on a regular basis.

[PROSANJIT MALLICK]

hi paula,
I ran your script and got a big output, but again how do I identify which process is a runaway process. Also how do you kill the dead processes.
My users dont use Xwindows.

Thanks
Prosanjit