FC6: pestered by zombies

[Steven P. Ulrick]

On Fri, 05 Jan 2007 15:27:29 -0500
Jeffrey Burns <jeff at jeffreyburns.net> wrote:

> On Fri, 2007-05-01 at 12:50 +0100, Alexander Volovics wrote:
> [snip]
> > I have probably been reading the 'ps' manpage while sleeping and I
> > had completely forgotten about 'pstree'. (I also managed to miss the
> > option to show dependencies in "System->Administration->System
> > Monitor").
> > 
> > The culprit in my case is 'escd' from the 'esc-1.0.0-16.fc6'
> > package. It spawns a 'netstat' child everytime and seems to fail to
> > 'reap' them when closing.
> > 
> > Maybe I should report this as a "buglet"?
> > 
> > Alexander
> 
> I've seen some of these netstat zombies lately, but the culprit in my
> case is evolution. From what I've been reading, if the parent process
> of the zombie fails to reap it and the parent process terminates, the
> zombie becomes a child of init which will periodically purge these
> entries from the process table.
> 
> I'm not sure how often init does this, but these zombies aren't
> consuming any resources (other than an entry in the process table) so
> it shouldn't be anything to worry about. I hope.
> 
> Jeff

Hello, Everyone
I've had it happen like this: let's say I'm using (or attempting to
use) my cd burner.  Sometimes on Fedora Core my USB burner would be
dropped for reasons beyond my understanding.  I would have to unplug
it, and plug it back in and all would be well.  If I FORGOT to do that,
I would end up with a zombie process of cdda2wav (or cdrecord if I was
burning a cd) and I could not use the burner (or that particular
application) until I got rid of the zombie process.  In the above
cases, killing the parent process would not touch it.  So, to get the
use of my burner back, I would have to reboot :(  I mention this in
reference to Jeffrey's statement about hoping they wouldn't be anything
to worry about.....  Of course, not all zombies are as stubborn as the
ones that I have had.....

Steven P. Ulrick

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