How can i kill the zombie processes,like using some background process which can help me reduce the process load on the server. the OS is AIX.
"zombie" processes do not consume any CPU or
memory whatsoever. The only system resource they
consume is a slot in the process table.
zombies typically occurr when some process
terminates abnormally and it's parent no longer
exists or the process itself is a process group
leader. You may want to check the man page
on the wait(2) system call or the wait(1)
command (in the case of a shell script).
You might want to find out what is causing
these zombies and eliminate the problem at the
source. In any case, removeing zombies will not
do anything to increase performance for the
reason stated above.
Thanx a lot but still i have one doubt, if i dont know how the parent process of the Zombie processes , than how can i track the parent process and since the zombie processes are attached to root than only root can kill it. is there any solution that i should restrict zombie process up to some extent at the user level.
Unfortunately, since zombies are "the living dead"
they cannot be "killed" since they are already
dead. I assume you are seeing many of them when
you run a "ps". When executing ps for example:
# ps -ef
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
root 1 0 0 Jun 01 - 1:55 /etc/init
root 6456 1 0 Jun 01 - 0:00 /usr/sbin/srcmstr
root 6740 6456 0 Jun 01 - 0:13 /usr/sbin/syslogd
You can see here that "init" is the "mother" of
all processes with PID of 1. As you see above,
the System Resource Controller (srcmstr) is the
parent of the Syslog Deamon (syslogd). This is
determined by syslogd's PPID being 6456 which
is the PID of srcmstr.
Can you determine what the PPID of the zombies
is? Is it the same for all of them? What was
changed on the system recently that may be
causing this?
Also, check your system logs in:
/var/adm/message and /var/adm/messages/syslog.log
for any relevant information.