How are zombies best dealt with, correctively? My OBSD 4.2 x86 machine is showing memory and CPU utilization are a negligable fraction of the total capacity. Yet, it is getting maxed out in regards to number of processes, apparently due to the zombies.
kill -KILL seems to have no effect. Some interaction between Apache2 and perl is creating zombies. After several months, this number has crept up to close to a thousand and with kern.maxproc=1024, problems are starting For example, ps says : ... _apache2 97 0.0 0.0 0 0 ?? Z - 0:00.00 (perl) _apache2 19083 0.0 0.0 0 0 ?? Z - 0:00.00 (perl) _apache2 24147 0.0 0.0 0 0 ?? Z - 0:00.00 (perl) _apache2 30821 0.0 0.0 0 0 ?? Z - 0:00.00 (perl) _apache2 6995 0.0 0.0 0 0 ?? Z - 0:00.00 (perl) _apache2 26059 0.0 0.0 0 0 ?? Z - 0:00.00 (perl) _apache2 31087 0.0 0.0 0 0 ?? Z - 0:00.00 (perl) ... So again, what corrective measures can be taken to rid the machine of zombie processes? And, is there a generic way to prevent them? The cause is a perl CGI called by apache2 Regards, -Lars
