zombie processes

[Julian Field]

At 08:05 17/06/2004, you wrote:
>Julian Field wrote:
>>At 18:42 15/06/2004, Marcel Karras wrote:
>>>2. Whenever I send a mail, there'll be a new zombie process and ps shows
>>>"[MailScanner <defunct>]". The mail will be scanned and delivered just
>>>perfect but you can certainly imagine what would happen if this server
>>>would work in a productive area rather than a testing one.
>>
>>And you should find it will destroy the zombie process itself pretty
>>quickly too.
>
>I've noticed this zombie process too on my Linux+exim gateways.  FreeBSD
>seems unaffected but all the BSD gateways run sendmail.
>
>I know what zombies are and why they occur, but "mailscanner <defunct>"
>is never being cleaned up.  So I did some digging that might help solve
>why.  The following applies to all my Debian (woody) systems running
>exim3, MailScanner 4.31.6 and McAfee.
>
>When MailScanner is started, it creates the parent and child instances
>as per the config.  When a message batch is scanned for the FIRST TIME
>by a child (each child) it spawns a zombie.  The first and subsequent
>batches are all scanned properly, but there are no more zombies[1], and
>the first zombie is never cleaned up.  After a while, I end up with one
>zombie from each child, until the child is killed due to old age.  When
>the child is killed, the zombie goes with it...until the new child reads
>its 1st batch then the zombie returns.

Are you 100% sure that the PID of the zombie process you see stays the
same? I would expect 1 zombie per batch, but you should find the pid
changes as it processes more batches.
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
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