killed procs are defunct now

[appi]

Hi all,

we are using SuSe Linux Enterprise Server 8.0. I need to know why a user process which is killed by root (kill -9 <id>) will be shown as a defunct process afterwards?
I hoped to get them out of the system with kill -9.
that much defunct processes will blow up our system when we go in production, i guess.


any helps are welcome.
regards
Uuwe

 

[unixfreak]

It's because the parent process doesn't clean it up. It's a badly written programme, complain to the person who wrote it.
You can't really do anything about zombies unfortunately.

Cheers

 

[KenCunningham]

You could also try to kill using -15 or some other signal, as -9 tends to take the sledgehammer approach.

 

[appi]

Thanks Ken,

I killed now the father process ID instead of the process ID. This deleted the process. But we need to be sure that this could not be proc #1
In our case it was always a legal parend-id. So I hope it will be okay for our work.
Nobody can watch for it, because it needs to be run at nights.

thanks for your helps
Uwe

 

[ericbrunson]

It usually happens when a process forks a child and doesn't properly handle the SIGCHILD one the subprocesses exit.