> > On 2008-03-12 at 15:46 +0100, Alexander Nagel wrote: > > My problem is that i have quite a big number of exim4 process with > > state ZOMBIE during mail delivery. Sometimes for any reason i dont > > know it happens that the ZOMBIE processes are not getting killed and > > they are getting more and more until NAGIOS is alerting. > > A zombie process is already dead. The only state which still exists is > an entry in the process table (and some other kernel house-keeping > structures) which records the state of the process, etc. A zombie > process is, simply, a dead process which the parent hasn't reaped. > > There is one way, and only one way, for a zombie process to go away: its > parent process reaps it. However, if you kill the parent process then > the zombie, like all that process's children, gets re-parented to be a > child of init (pid 1) which always reaps all its children. Thus, the > parent process reaps it (but it's a different parent). > > Exim's model is to have a process handle each delivery, so if that > process has zombie children then the parent is stuck waiting on > something else. In your case, the spamc process is typically running. > When the spamc process exits, Exim cleans up. > > The existence of the zombie processes is not your problem. The presence > of other processes which are hanging and which Exim is waiting on is a > possible problem and the zombie processes are a symptom of that, a > side-effect. I know what zombie processes are, but the problem is that the zombies are not getting killed by init (pid 1). They are still there and i can kill them only with -9 I always try -15 to prevent data loss ;-)
> > There is no need to kill the exim processes with -9 (SIGKILL), since > then Exim doesn't have a chance to clean up after itself and you > potentially risk leaving corrupted DB files around. If you really have > to kill Exim, is it really true that SIGTERM (-15, the default) doesn't > work for you? > > > Debian- 16817 0.0 0.0 3264 768 ? S 15:27 0:00 \_ > > /usr/bin/spamc -t 10 -u XXXXXXXXXX > > spamc should be timing out after 10 seconds (-t 10). If it's not then > there's the problem. Figure out why spamassassin is hanging. I check that. Thx for your answer Alex > > -Phil > > -- > ## List details at http://lists.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users > ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ > ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://wiki.exim.org/ > _______________________________________________________________________ Jetzt neu! Schützen Sie Ihren PC mit McAfee und WEB.DE. 30 Tage kostenlos testen. http://www.pc-sicherheit.web.de/startseite/?mc=022220 -- ## List details at http://lists.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://wiki.exim.org/
