Hi,

My system is FC9. Currently whenever a process finishes execution it remains as a zombie process indefinitely and never dies, now under control of the init process. It appears init is never executing wait.

This is a major problem as my system is a webserver where hundreds of internal and public emails are sent daily. As a result when I last checked, there were upward of 4000 defunct sendmail processes.
Eventually the httpd was reporting memory usage errors, I suspect because the process table had no room for more PIDs. I was forced to reboot/kill init thread in order kill them all.

On boot my server has about 24mb of memory free of ~384 which can be reduced if I optimise the httpd and mysqld. Could lack of memory cause this?!

I am fairly inexperienced with Linux so any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

init cleans up zombies if their parent process dies without terminating its child processes cleanly. Your zombies sound like their parent is still running, just not 'wait'-ing its children.

_________________
/ Peter

Yes, it is init (PID=1) that is not wait()-ing its newly adopted zombie procs.

For example, sendmail is running and starts a new child to send a new email. The parent sendmail process does not die, however the child process gets adopted by init and remains a zombie.
I just cannot understand why this is happening