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Showing posts from May, 2013

Killing orphans and zombies

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First please do not misunderstand me about "killing orphans and zombies". I'm for sure not going to hurt people without parents or people that are already dead :-( I'm talking about running processes that can be harmful for your system and shuld be better get killed. First of all a Zombie process is not an orphan process. As the word says, an orphan process is a procees without legitim parent, a zombie process is not alive but still have an entry in parent table. A process can be orphaned either intentionally or unintentionally. Sometime a parent process exits/terminates or crashes leaving the child process still running, and then they become orphans. In Linux/Unix like operating systems, as soon as parents of any process are dead, re-parenting occurs, automatically. Re-parenting processes whose parents are dead, means Orphaned processes, are immediately adopted by special process "init". Take a look to a htop situation where winexe causes a lot of or