Using swatch 3.2.3 on a few servers for some time now, I was surprised to find (by accident) that several zombie processes were present on all the servers. The zombies were created/caused by the swatch 'exec' command.
I have added a comment to this bug report that the problem still exists. My concern is that on servers, which may not be rebooted for some time, the number of zombies could well grow, and, as in my case, may not be noticed.
John.
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As a work-around, I use cron to stop and start swatch once/night. Means that I go blind briefly, of course, but at least on my systems, this keeps the zombie count down.
-sk
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Yes, but as you say that is a work-around, and I really don't want to have to stop/start processes, certainly every night, just to clear up zombies. It would be better for the code to either wait for the child to finish, as the patch does, or change the CHLD default to allow init to reap any zombies.
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Hello,
Using swatch 3.2.3 on a few servers for some time now, I was surprised to find (by accident) that several zombie processes were present on all the servers. The zombies were created/caused by the swatch 'exec' command.
It seems that this has already been reported as a problem, albeit a few years ago - Tracker bug id 1721418 - http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1721418&group_id=68627&atid=521868
I have added a comment to this bug report that the problem still exists. My concern is that on servers, which may not be rebooted for some time, the number of zombies could well grow, and, as in my case, may not be noticed.
John.
As a work-around, I use cron to stop and start swatch once/night. Means that I go blind briefly, of course, but at least on my systems, this keeps the zombie count down.
-sk
Yes, but as you say that is a work-around, and I really don't want to have to stop/start processes, certainly every night, just to clear up zombies. It would be better for the code to either wait for the child to finish, as the patch does, or change the CHLD default to allow init to reap any zombies.