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List:       freebsd-hackers
Subject:    Re: DEFUNCT
From:       Greg Lehey <grog () lemis ! com>
Date:       2000-03-30 9:13:16
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On Thursday, 30 March 2000 at 10:51:23 +0200, Kasper wrote:
> Why is my system often go into defunct. I cant do anything and have
> to reboot it, please can anyone tell me what to do. I can not do a
> reboot.
> 
> My server is a webserver whit perl, php.
> 
> Below is a picture of top.

Please don't wrap the lines.  It makes it difficult to read.

> PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES    STATE    TIME WCPU CPU      COMMAND
> 314 root       0   0     0    0     0 Z       0  0.0  0.0   0:03 klogd <defunct>

(etc).

This process is a zombie (see the state Z).  It has died, but its
parent is misbehaving and hasn't buried it.  You can usually get rid
of zombies by getting rid of the parent as well and hoping that the
grandparent buries the whole family; possibly the whole tribe may need
to be exterminated.

Top won't tell you who the parent is.  You need ps for that.  For
example, to find the parent of process 2998, do:

$ ps lp2998
  UID   PID  PPID CPU PRI NI   VSZ  RSS WCHAN  STAT  TT       TIME COMMAND
 1004  2998   978   0  10  0   612  220 wait   I+    p3    0:00.00 sh -c ec \
'/usr/home/grog/mutt-mojave-978-3

The parent is PPID (978 in this case).  This one isn't a zombie, but
in your case you will find the parent of process 314 (in this case).
It would be interesting to see what the process is.

Greg
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