Acroread never dies

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Pietro Cerutti wrote:

> acroread7-7.0.8,1
> acroreadwrapper-0.0.20060221
> firefox-2.0_2,1
>
> the Acrobat Reader 7 plugin works just fine, but the acroread process
> doesn't die even after the Firefox window containing the object
> visualized by the plugin (a PDF document) has been closed.
>
> The process is displayed in top(1), sometimes in status "select",
> sometimes even in status "RUN".
> 17468 piter         1  97    0   107M 79776K select   0:06  0.20% 
> acroread
>
> I just don't understand why the process stays alive, and what it's
> does, when RUNning.

It's stays in memory so that th next document that you load, will not 
require it to start up again.  Typical Windows behaviour transmitted to 
FreeBSD and presumably other OSen as well.

Personally I hate that behaviour, since when running in a browser window 
you have nothing obvious to kill if you know you don't want to read 
anything else.

That's just how it is.  Nothing is wrong with your installation.

The process as you list it is in select, so it's not actually slowing 
your machine down, just chewing memory.

--Alex