Netstat Zombies

[Tom Needs a Hat Mitchell]

On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 10:04:48PM +0100, Björn Persson wrote:
> Tom Needs a Hat Mitchell wrote:
> >On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 04:15:43AM -0800, edwarner99 at yahoo.com wrote:
> >
> >>I'm getting netstat zombies showing up from various
> >>programs like, mozilla 1.5, bash, sh, etc...
.....

> I get Netstat zombies too. I haven't thought of them as a big problem, 
> but I can show you an example. Right now I have one that's about four 
> days old. It's a child of Mozilla:
> 
> $ ps x -f
> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY      STAT   TIME CMD
> bjorn     4390     1  0 Feb24 ?        S      0:00 kdeinit: Running...
> bjorn    30579  4390  0 Mar05 ?        S     23:30 
> /usr/lib/mozilla-1.4.1/mozilla-bin
> bjorn    30714 30579  0 Mar05 ?        Z      0:00 [netstat <defunct>]
> 
> I don't remember if they're always from Mozilla. I've never seen more 
> than one at a time. Not that I have looked for them.

Since Mozilla is still there and is the 'parent' of the defunct process
the resolution to this must be in mozilla-bin.   

Since there is only one or two I would ASSERT() that this is not a problem.

If there was 500 or a thousand such that you were running out of process slots
there would be a problem to fix.

If you are curious... You might be able to track this down and
discover the why and what about the helper application Mozilla was
using.  In this case it is netstat  but could be a viewer (pdf,
ghostscript), mail agent, multi media player or the script that
launches any of these.  Other helpers may simply be used to make
decisions at start time.

Some additional details might be seen with with strace...
Checking the args that are passed to netstat might tell you 
what mozilla was checking when it ran netstat.

BTW: I see an instance of [netstat <defunct>] too.

Since mozilla is open source... it is fair to look.


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