Kill Defunct

[Ken Lee_1]

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

[Victor_5 · Accepted solution]

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

[someone_4]

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

[Sanjay_6]

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

[Frank Slootweg]

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").

[Scott Van Kalken]

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.