26 Apr
2024
26 Apr
'24
1:52 p.m.
On Thursday 25 April 2024 22:37:44 deloptes via tde-users wrote:
William Morder via tde-users wrote:
In my own case, recent developments have provided some new information. Last
night I went to sleep and forgot to take the machine offline, and in the
morning, I found that I had been disconnected. Internet here has again been
iffy, off and on, but sometimes I get knocked offline for unknown reasons.
Now that I think about it, when I do have crowds of zombies, it usually seems
to happen when I have gone offline, or been knocked offline, rather than
shutting down certain internet programs, notably tor and privoxy. (I use
tork-trinity to manage my proxies.)
I had to restart my proxy, then I used iwconfig and ifconfig to restart my
connection. I noticed that top showed 17 zombies.
So I said, let's see. As one can see from the output below, most of these
zombies are indeed root processes named w, whatever that means here.
No (if readers are wondering), I have not yet tried to trace these PIDs to
discover exactly what are these processes; but at least I know that those
mysterious w processes indeed often are the zombies, and that they are owned
by root.
Bill
ps auxwww | grep 'Z'
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 1107 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr23 1:43 [w]
<defunct>
root 2471 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr23 2:01 [w]
<defunct>
<user> 3782 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr21 0:00 [sh]
<defunct>
root 4779 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr21 3:25 [w]
<defunct>
root 4863 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr23 1:36 [w]
<defunct>
root 8831 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr24 1:00 [w]
<defunct>
root 10333 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr24 1:30 [w]
<defunct>
root 10486 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr22 2:56 [w]
<defunct>
root 11969 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr24 1:10 [w]
<defunct>
root 15604 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr24 0:59 [w]
<defunct>
root 16754 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr22 2:22 [w]
<defunct>
root 17309 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr22 2:14 [w]
<defunct>
root 21189 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr24 1:03 [w]
<defunct>
root 21852 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr22 2:50 [w]
<defunct>
root 23849 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr23 2:13 [w]
<defunct>
<user> 27727 0.0 0.0 1606224 928 ? Ssl Apr23 0:20
clamd -c /home/<user>/klammailkIZTym
root 29096 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr21 3:22 [w]
<defunct>
root 32585 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z Apr25 0:35 [w]
<defunct>
That is just a kind of "ghost" (so to
speak), traces of a process that is
no longer actually running.
In my case the parent firefox process was still running. The child process
was killed because of "high quality" developers of web pages are producing
such content that overloads the system and oom killer kicks in. The stupid
thing is, it causes the PC to consume also more power untill it decides to
die or be killed.