Friday, February 3, 2012

Zombie process

Zombie is the phase in which the child process terminates and is not removed from the system process table until the parent process acknowledges the death of the child process. In this case, the child process is said to be in a Zombie state.
Note that the process in the Zombie state is not alive and does not use any resources or accomplish any work. However, it is not allowed to die until the parent process acknowledges the exit call. If a process is creating a lot of zombies, it has a programming bug or error in its code and isn't working correctly.

Will too many Zombie Processes create issues?

While zombie processes aren't a problem as they do not take up any resource, there is one concern. Linux systems have a maximum amount of processes and thus process ID numbers. If a computer has enough zombie processes, the maximum amount is reached and new processes can't be launched.

The maximum amount of processes can be listed by typing the "cat /proc/sys/kernel/pid_max" in a terminal window and is usually 32768.

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