Re: runit not collecting zombies

[Charlie Brady <charlieb-supervision@budge.apana.org.au>]

On Sat, 15 Sep 2007, Alex Efros wrote:

> And, Charlie, I wish to repeat this again: forget about ssh. This issue
> isn't related to ssh itself.

Obviously I need to repeat myself as well. You have two problems. Various 
programs, including sshd and your silly cron script, are generating 
zombies, and also runit as proc 1 is not reaping those zombies. Since 
nobody is solving the runit problem (which could lie in the kernel), you 
can minimise your inconvenience by reducing the incidence of zombies 
reparented to proc 1.

Note that some zombies may exist temporarily which are not and will not be 
reparented to proc 1. Those zombies are processes which have exited whose 
parents are still running and have not yet reaped the child's status.

> # ps -ef axf | tail -n 3
> sshd     14804     1  0 13:50 ?        Z      0:00 [sshd] <defunct>
> sshd     14926     1  0 15:23 ?        Z      0:00 [sshd] <defunct>
> root     14954     1  0 15:31 pts/1    Z      0:00 [perl] <defunct>
>
> Starting from some point (usually after 2-7 days uptime), process N1 stop
> reaping zombies. Any zombies. After that point. That's all. Nothing about
> ssh in this equation.

I assume you mean process 1 when you say process N1.

I'm not denying that runit as proc 1 seems to have a problem on your 
system. But since your problem is accumulated zombies, if you stop 
generating them, that problem becomes unimportant. If you reduce the 
generation of zombies, the runit problem becomes less important (or at 
least less urgent).

Have I now made myself clear?