On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 12:09:11PM -0400, Daniel Patrick Berdine wrote:
| On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Andrei Ivanov wrote:
|
| > Well, if its a zombie process, it'll go away by itself after a while.
| > Can you send an output of ps aux for that process (or top), please?
| > Andrei
|
| not zombie...
|
| 19355 rothaar 9 0 90588 88M 476 D 0.0 17.6 0:01 plot.out
^^^
IIRC (not at a linux box to check) that column is % of CPU being used.
Since it isn't using any CPU it is only a problem for you as far as
memory hogging goes.
As Joost was indicating, the problem is the process is waiting
(blocked) in the kernel; in some sort of system call (maybe sbrk or
fork or something else that requires kernel services). The difficulty
is that if the kernel just killed it, who would clean up after the
kernel? Instead what current implementations do is hold any signals
for the process until it returns to userland from inside the kernel.
Then it is safe for the kernel to kill it because it isn't in the
middle of the kernel anymore.
So aside from rebooting, praying, and coming up with a new
breakthrough in OS theory, you don't really have anything you can do
about it.
-D
