init never reaping zombie processes
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
2 Replies
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