[tde-users] Re: how to kill zombies

On Tuesday 23 April 2024 10:30:47 you wrote: Hi Jim! My machine is fairly new, only a couple years old, and I am running Devuan Daedalus, upgraded within the last month. Here are some snips from top. I am only showing lines that relate to zombies or those mysterious processes with the label w. (For security reasons, I prefer not to show everything all at once about my system; such as, e.g., my user name.) Please see attachments. As you can see, I only have one zombie at present -- didn't try to track down what processes are involved -- but at times there have been as many as dozens. They seem to come in dozens or half-dozens, by the way, for reasons unknown to me: above a certain number, they always seem to come in multiples of 6 or 12, like 24, 36, 42. When it gets to be a couple dozen zombies, this irks me, and that's when I want to call in the zombie-killing experts. No, I don't think it's "good" for so many zombies to persist after their parents have quit running, but I also don't notice that my system runs any worse. When I thought that I had identified one of my zombies as one of those mysterious w processes, and tried to kill that, that's when I shut down my session and lost my work; which, obviously, was worse that putting up with zombies. It seems to me that the mysterious w is not any one process, but rather a kind of process that has become a zombie. Otherwise, there could not be, as sometimes happens, half a dozen processes named w. As for the age of my machine or system: the nature of Devuan in spirit is more deliberately set against newfangled shiny toys, and tends to rely on the more reliable stone tools used the hardcore caveman geeks. Bill P.S. Apologies if I sent some duplicate emails. For some reason, my response to Jim, with attachments, did not go through. Please consider this one to be the authorized version ... if it goes through.