1.4.3 (SunOS/sparc): canceled jobs / thousands of 'defunct' processes

Matthias Apitz guru at unixarea.de
Tue Sep 20 06:00:37 PDT 2011


> look into these
>
> PreserveJobHistory No # Files that start with cxxxxxxx
> PreserveJobFiles No # Files that start with dxxxxxxxx
>
> maybe it just isn't purging them properly.
>

Thanks for the hint, we will look at this in cupsd.conf;

while stop/start of cupsd (to get rid of the 'socket' backends which have been sitting around) we encountered the following dramatical situation:

the stop of cupsd with the normal stop script (which just does only a "kill pid" thousands (~10.000) of defunct processes were created:

    root  6515  5026   0        - ?           0:00 <defunct>
      lp  6514  5026   0        - ?           0:00 <defunct>
      lp  6513  5026   0        - ?           0:00 <defunct>
    root  6512  5026   0        - ?           0:00 <defunct>
      lp  6511  5026   0        - ?           0:00 <defunct>
      lp  6510  5026   0        - ?           0:00 <defunct>
    root  6509  5026   0        - ?           0:00 <defunct>
      lp  6508  5026   0        - ?           0:00 <defunct>
      lp  6507  5026   0        - ?           0:00 <defunct>
    root  6506  5026   0        - ?           0:00 <defunct>
      lp  6505  5026   0        - ?           0:00 <defunct>
      lp  6504  5026   0        - ?           0:00 <defunct>
    root  6503  5026   0        - ?           0:00 <defunct>

After re-starting cups they went away.

What does this mean?

     matthias




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