Re: Defunct processes

Philip Hazel writes:

| On Wed, 18 Dec 1996, Max Caines wrote:
|
| > I've just started running Exim 1.58 on a Sun Ultra 1 (Solaris 2.5.1), and I
| > seem to have a fairly constant low level of defunct processes on the system,
| > all of them running as 'exim'. As time goes on some go away and others
| > appear, so I always seem to have 8-12 around. Is this normal, or should I be
| > trying to find a reason?
|
| There were some problems with defunct processes, but on Linux, not
| Solaris. We are still on 2.4 here (but going 2.5 soon) and I've just
| looked on our busiest system. I found one such process, but it went away
| immediately after.

We're seeing something similar, with 1.59 on the Ultra 1s which now
handle most of Loughborough's mail (another site converts to Exim :-)

It's actually getting to be quite a nuisance, coz the Exim processes
left hanging around are consuming a lot of CPU time. Hmmm... guess
we ought to be limiting them. From a cursory glance with lsof and
netstat it looks as though each of the zomboid (actually not zombies -
just stopped) Exims has an outgoing TCP connection for an SMTP session
wedged in TIME_WAIT state. I'd expect the 4 minute kernel timeout to
kick in, but it doesn't seem to be happening. Wonder if that's it ?

If we get it licked I'll drop the list a line with the details.

Merry Xmas!

Martin