Re: runit not collecting zombies

[Alex Efros <powerman@powerman.asdfGroup.com>]

Hi!

On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 09:55:16AM -0400, Charlie Brady wrote:
>> Hi! Any progress on this? Alex, have you found at least a workaround? This
>> is getting really annoying as I have to reboot my servers manually ...

Nope. Chances are I'll write a script to check amount of zombies every 10
minutes and reboot if there >100 zombies. :~( I'm tired of manual server
monitoring and reboot every 2-7 days.

> You can make the problem (whatever it is) a non-issue for you, as it is for 
> nearly everyone else, if you can fix whichever run script is generating 
> zombies. It's possible, believe me.
>
> [I've still seen no evidence that openssh generates zombies.]

I'm so happy about you see no evidence, but, bad for me, I see these
evidence in my `ps` output every ~week. Please stop repeating yourself.
We all already know what you think about this issue. There IS a bug
somewhere (runit/kernel/somewhere else) and you don't help us to fix it.
The idea is: no matter what user are doing, there shouldn't be increasing
number of unreaped zombies in the system. If this isn't work - then it is
a bug, and it should be fixed. Asking user not to do something (don't run
chpst -L from cron) which just increase _probability_ to hit that bug
isn't a solution at all, because there different software which also
produce unreaped zombies (like ssh). This isn't a solution because chpst
doesn't do anything wrong - just like ssh and other software.
Your recommendation sounds like 'start less short-living processes', which
is idiocy! Server should work, and if it work is to run a lot of
short-living processes - then it should do this in reliable manner without
requiring reboot every several days. Sorry for my emotions - now I've a
lot of Linux servers which work just like Windows - from reboot to reboot -
and that makes me a little angry...

>>>> So. If this is a race condition bug in linux kernel 2.6.20, how to debug it?
>>> Have a look at SystemTap.

Sadly, but I've a lot of work last months, so I haven't tried to debug
kernel myself. (I've tried to ask gentoo kernel devs to research this
issue, but looks like they don't believe this is problem in glibc/kernel,
and point me back to runit.)

-- 
			WBR, Alex.