hi all.
I'll try to give as much info as possible about this small annoyance.
Just to summarize what's happening, though, I'm seeing a lot of
orphaned processes on both redhat 7.3 and 8.0 boxes. By 'orphaned', I
mean that the processes wind up being listed as having PPID '1', and
not attached to any pty.
For example, I have blackbox running on my local desktop, and if I open
up Eterm, issue the command 'vi myfile', and then click the eterm
window control to close the window, I'll be left with a bash and Eterm
process, both under PPID '1', and a vi process owned by the original
bash process (now a child of PPID '1').
On my local machine, this really isn't much of an issue, because I
actually make a point of exiting everything properly. I never just
click to close a window. However, we have some 7.3 workgroup servers
that people in the department can just 'ssh -X' to, and they may not be
so careful. After a while, the load average on these machines goes up
over 3 or 4, and I find myself running 'ps -ef | grep vi' and killing
off old vi (and emacs) processes. Doing this causes the load average
to (almost every time) 0.00 again.
The 8.0 machine is running a redhat stock kernel (2.4.18), and has 1GB
of RAM.
The 7.3 machines are dual Xeon Dell 2650's running a custom-configured
2.4.20 kernel. They're all identical from both a hardware and software
perspective.
Is there a way to kill off these orphans, or detect them with some
script to make the job of maintaining these boxes easier?
Also, why does this seem to only happen on Linux boxes? I have only
seen this on solaris in very rare instances. Is this a problem with
the individual applications not exiting properly, or a problem with the
kernel or redhat or something? Anything I can do?
Thanks for any advice here.
brian.
--
Psyche-list mailing list
Psyche-list@redhat.com
https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
