Hi there, Just installed nagios, and it's zombie check script has (about once a week) started reporting Zombie processes. When I check, they are the following: Code: 502 7062 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Feb14 0:00 [freshclam] <defunct> 502 13245 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 01:42 0:00 [freshclam] <defunct> 502 23296 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 04:06 0:00 [freshclam] <defunct> 502 27888 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 06:30 0:00 [freshclam] <defunct> I can't kill the processes, and HUPing freshclam doesn't help. The only thing that gets rid of them is to restart the ISPConfig server: Code: /etc/init.d/ispconfig_server restart Anybody know why they are being left around, and how I can stop them? For ref, I'm on ISPConfig v2.2.19 Thanks, Neil
Well, in my understanding, Zombies occur when a process terminates, but the parent process fails to reap it's dead children (don't you love unix terminology!). I don't think, in such small numbers, they would ever be a problem, of course. They do seem to dissappear eventually... The question is though, why are they there? I would have thought that freshclamd is probably the culprit, so maybe this would be sorted by including a newer version of that in a later release of ISPConfig. For now I think I'll just modify the relevant line in Nagios' NRPE config file! Thanks, Neil
FYI, Wikipedia gives a good overview of Zombie processes here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_process
