On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 11:57:57AM +0200, Heinecke at hansenet.com wrote:
Hi,
every "checkpoint-interval" i get a new hobbitd zombie process.
#> ps auxwww ----snip --- hobbit 25559 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 11:06 0:00 [hobbitd] <defunct> hobbit 25917 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 11:16 0:00 [hobbitd] <defunct> hobbit 26283 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 11:26 0:00 [hobbitd] <defunct> hobbit 26648 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 11:36 0:00 [hobbitd] <defunct>
You're right that it is related to the checkpoint'ing - hobbitd forks a child process to save the checkpoint file.
What I don't understand is why it isn't cleaned up afterwards. Could you do a "ps -lw -u hobbit" ? I'm curious to see what the PPID is for these zombies.
This happens on Debian LINUX 3.1 'Sarge'. Analog config on different Solaris 8 SPARC Boxes => no problem.
On the Debian box, i have DISABLED bbdisplay in hobbitlaunch.cfg, because this box should only act as a kind of LAN probe (only bb-net and forwarding of LAN client stati to a central bbdisplay)
In that case you don't need hobbitd running at all.
Hmm - perhaps this happens because there are no messages sent to this hobbitd instance. I think that's the cause - looking over the code it seems that if no messages arrive, the code to clean up the child processes is never reached.
The attached patch should fix it, although it is of course a non-issue if you stop hobbitd on this box.
Regards, Henrik