Can you determine what process started these zombies? If it is spamdyke, you should see some spamdyke processes that have been running at least as long as the defunct qmail-smtpd processes. You can see the PIDs of the parent processes with a command like this: ps axo user,pid,ppid,%cpu,%mem,vsz,rss,tty,stat,start_time,time,cmd That mimics the output of "ps aux" but adds the PPID field.
What version of spamdyke are you using? It had some problems with leaving zombie processes in the past but those have all been resolved (to my knowledge). I'd love to know where the spamdyke processes are stuck. strace might lend some clues. If spamdyke was compiled with debugging symbols, a stack trace from gdb would be best. -- Sam Clippinger Bruce Schreiber wrote: > I now have 10 qmail-smtpd zombie processes running. This has all > occurred since Spamdyke was implemented. ps aux |grep Z shows: > > USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND > qmaild 25253 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr20 0:00 > [qmail-smtpd <defunct>] > qmaild 25255 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr20 0:00 > [qmail-smtpd <defunct>] > qmaild 25273 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr20 0:00 > [qmail-smtpd <defunct>] > qmaild 13013 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr29 0:00 > [qmail-smtpd <defunct>] > qmaild 28360 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z May08 0:00 > [qmail-smtpd <defunct>] > qmaild 21187 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z May28 0:00 > [qmail-smtpd <defunct>] > qmaild 2342 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z May28 0:00 > [qmail-smtpd <defunct>] > qmaild 11080 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Jun06 0:00 > [qmail-smtpd <defunct>] > qmaild 12012 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Jun06 0:00 > [qmail-smtpd <defunct>] > qmaild 30223 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Jun14 0:00 > [qmail-smtpd <defunct>] > > As can be seen, they are infrequent, but they are annoying. Two questions: > 1) short of rebooting, how do you get rid of a zombie (you can't kill > them, hence the name). > 2) Any inkling as to what may be causing these zombies? > > Bruce > ___ > > .mdEmail and .mdSecureIM allow transmission of PHI in compliance with HIPAA. > Each is included when you register a .md Domain Name. > http://www.max.md/register.php?affid=footer1 > _______________________________________________ > spamdyke-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.spamdyke.org/mailman/listinfo/spamdyke-users > _______________________________________________ spamdyke-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.spamdyke.org/mailman/listinfo/spamdyke-users
