=> There are 90 zombie processes.
On one of my Homelab servers running Ubuntu Jammy, I always seem to get zombie processes. A quick check with ps -eo pid,ppid,stat,cmd | grep -w Z shows them all <defunct>. It just bugs me. I shut down the server in the most nicest of ways I know how with sudo shutdown -h now but I always get zombie processes shown on start up.
Am I missing something? Do these show up on your servers? How do you deal with them besides just ignoring them if they are <defunct>?
Zombies that stick around for more than a few seconds indicate a signal problem in the parent process, where its init is stuck in the “wait” state, so the entry remains in the PID table.
It could be harmless, but it could become a problem if you need the resources. Curl shouldn’t be doing this on its own.
That’s the thing. None of them are consuming resources. I guess I should just ignore them, but it irritates me when I start my server, to see zombie processes. Makes me think something is askew.
Zombie processes do not use resources, well, a little, it’s basically an entry describing how it exited.
The parent process is the thing keeping the zombie entry open. Killing it’s parent should work if they bother you.
Agreed, but a very poorly-written program having a hanging memory or disk write, or a file lock could become a problem, especially if hundreds or thousands of zombies are waiting for something.
that sounds like poor garbage collection in an application.
I’ve written software that had similar issues when writing to files and I failed to “close” the file after writing.
processes stay open, files stay open. 500 byte processes times 10000 orphaned process can make for a bad time.