Process handlers, and zombies, or preap(1)

[Chris H]

> On Monday, March 31, 2014 4:06:43 pm Chris H wrote:
>> Greetings,
>>  I'm evaluating/experimenting on releng_9. The install, and now
>> custom kernel have noting exotic, or anything out of the ordinary.
>> top(1), and ps(1) indicate a (1) zombie, or <defunct> process. On
>> my releng_8 systems, when I occasionally encounter one of these,
>> they soon disappear (are reaped) from the process table. While I
>> have not investigated this far enough on both versions to determine
>> whether the parent process reaped the child on the releng_8 systems,
>> and the parent on releng_9 is simply an irresponsible parent, eg;
>> a different parent. Before I do, I was wondering if there was any
>> specific difference between the 2 versions that might cause better
>> handling of such situations. While I recognize that resource
>> starvation is HIGHLY unlikely, except by perhaps a rouge parent
>> spawning multitudes of zombies. I thought it might be useful for
>> "housekeeping" to 1) provide a process table housekeeper (zombie
>> reaper), or 2) create a system utility/command like SunOS/OpenSolaris
>> has; preap(1).
>>
>> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=preap&manpath=SunOS+5.10
>>
>> Thank you for your time, and consideration.
>
> Nothing is different with child processes in 9 vs 8.  It is most
> likely a misbehaving parent (or the parent is stuck or hung).

Hello, John, and thank you for the reply.
Right you are. Julian Elischer was kind enough to remind me that
ps -alx
would give me the information I needed to find the seemingly
"lazy" parent process. But not before I had already (re)created
a (Free)BSD version of preap(1), and cleared the entry from the
proc table.
However, it re-appeared again. So this time I traced it to it's
parent, and now I can deal with it /properly/. It's an old port
who's development was taken over by a Windows developer. So he
doesn't have access to the *NIX-isms. I'll see if I can find
the time to coordinate some effort(s) to clean it up, or branch
a NIX version.

Thank you /very/ much for addressing my original question.

--Chris

>
> --
> John Baldwin
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