On Fri, 05 Jan 2007 15:27:29 -0500 Jeffrey Burns <jeff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, 2007-05-01 at 12:50 +0100, Alexander Volovics wrote: > [snip] > > I have probably been reading the 'ps' manpage while sleeping and I > > had completely forgotten about 'pstree'. (I also managed to miss the > > option to show dependencies in "System->Administration->System > > Monitor"). > > > > The culprit in my case is 'escd' from the 'esc-1.0.0-16.fc6' > > package. It spawns a 'netstat' child everytime and seems to fail to > > 'reap' them when closing. > > > > Maybe I should report this as a "buglet"? > > > > Alexander > > I've seen some of these netstat zombies lately, but the culprit in my > case is evolution. From what I've been reading, if the parent process > of the zombie fails to reap it and the parent process terminates, the > zombie becomes a child of init which will periodically purge these > entries from the process table. > > I'm not sure how often init does this, but these zombies aren't > consuming any resources (other than an entry in the process table) so > it shouldn't be anything to worry about. I hope. > > Jeff Hello, Everyone I've had it happen like this: let's say I'm using (or attempting to use) my cd burner. Sometimes on Fedora Core my USB burner would be dropped for reasons beyond my understanding. I would have to unplug it, and plug it back in and all would be well. If I FORGOT to do that, I would end up with a zombie process of cdda2wav (or cdrecord if I was burning a cd) and I could not use the burner (or that particular application) until I got rid of the zombie process. In the above cases, killing the parent process would not touch it. So, to get the use of my burner back, I would have to reboot :( I mention this in reference to Jeffrey's statement about hoping they wouldn't be anything to worry about..... Of course, not all zombies are as stubborn as the ones that I have had..... Steven P. Ulrick -- 20:22:15 up 32 days, 2:30, 1 user, load average: 0.25, 0.38, 0.37