Hello,
When a server has thousands of defunct/zombie processes, what is the
ramifications this will have to the AIX operating system? The only
evidence that I've found is that the defunct process take up process
slots. Does someone know other issues that will arise if these defunct
process hang around, or more so, increase over time? Yes, and I am
certainly aware that this is a program application issue.
Cheers!

they also take up memory

Eventually you will reach the process limit of AIX, I believe at about 1 million
processes. We had a similar issue on 4.3.3. Other than that, it will run happily
until it reaches that limit.

shpot4@yahoo.com wrote:
> Hello,
> When a server has thousands of defunct/zombie processes, what is the
> ramifications this will have to the AIX operating system? The only
> evidence that I've found is that the defunct process take up process
> slots. Does someone know other issues that will arise if these defunct
> process hang around, or more so, increase over time? Yes, and I am
> certainly aware that this is a program application issue.
> Cheers!
>

By the way... Is there any means to get rid of that zombies besides
rebooting the system?

On 2005-12-03, A.Teterkin <A.Teterkin@hostco.ru> wrote:

> By the way... Is there any means to get rid of that zombies besides
> rebooting the system?

Yes, you can exit the application that is failing to wait() for its
child processes. By doing that, those child processes (the zombies)
get reparented to init. init will periodically wait() in case a zombie
gets reparented to it. This will get rid of the zombies.

However, this does mean that you have to quit the problematic
application.

--
Jurjen Oskam