From owner-freebsd-questions  Mon Apr 12  1:17:34 1999
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Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 10:15:12 +0200
To: Paul Dekkers <psd@cgu.nl>
From: Stefano Riva <sriva@alice.it>
Subject: Re: HELP: Why all those zombie's?
Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
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At 09.44 12/04/99 +0200, you wrote:
>I ran top, and suddenly I saw:
>321 processes: 1 running, 24 sleeping, 1 stopped, 295 zombie
>AW! Why all those zombie's? I still see processes from some days ago in
>ps auxww, is a reboot the only method? (And won't it occur again?)
>The box is running 3.0R and is a 486 with 40MB's of ram.

  You have to identify those processes. Are they all instances of the same
program? If so, who's the parent of that program (i.e. where is it started
from)?
  A zombie is a process that has died, but its slot in the process table
has not been released, probably because the parent has blocked without
doing a proper "wait".

---

  Stefano Riva
  Software Engineer - Systems Administrator
  Informazioni Editoriali I.E. Srl
  Phone +39-027528400, Fax +39-027528451
  Email sriva@alice.it


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