Debian + Exec-Program = Zombie process

[Bjørn Mork]

George Chelidze <wrath at geo.net.ge> writes:

> as soon as I send accounting stop packet to radius, test.pl executes and 
> becomes a zombie. (I tried bash script, c program with the same result.)
>
>  3890 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/local/freeradius/sbin/radiusd
>  3893 ?        Z      0:00  \_ [test.pl] <defunct>
>
> As far as I know, this should have been fixed in 1.0.3 and I doubt it's 
> debian specific, as I know 0.93 works on another RH 7.3 without a 
> problem (In fact zombie is listed there as well but disappears after 
> several seconds).
>
> Any ideas/suggestions?

Is it replaced by a new zombie the next time you send an accounting
packet, or do the zombies add up?

The way I read rad_fork(), it will call reap_children() every time it
is called.  But there's not necessarily anything calling
reap_children() inbetween. This means that zombies will only live
forever on servers without traffic.

You should probably read the comment in front of reap_children() in
src/main/threads.c.  I believe it explains why this design was chosen.



Bjørn