AW: [hobbit] increasing no. of hobbitd zombie's

[Heinecke at hansenet.com]

Hi Henrik,

here is the "ps -lw -u hobbit":

IVRP01:/opt/monitoring/hobbit/server/etc# ps -lw -u hobbit
F S   UID   PID  PPID  C PRI  NI ADDR SZ WCHAN  TTY          TIME CMD
1 S  1014 28281     1  0  60   0 -   380 nanosl ?        00:00:00 hobbitlaunch
0 S  1014 28282 28281  0  69   0 -   856 select ?        00:00:00 hobbitd
0 S  1014 28283 28281  0  69   0 -   384 select ?        00:00:00 bbproxy
0 S  1014 28288 28281  0  69   0 -   508 semtim ?        00:00:00 hobbitd_channel
0 S  1014 28289 28288  0  69   0 -   521 select ?        00:00:00 hobbitd_history
1 Z  1014 30216 28282  0  69   0 -     0 exit   ?        00:00:00 hobbitd <defunct>
0 S  1014 30243     1  0  77   0 -   578 wait4  ?        00:00:00 sh
0 S  1014 30246 30243  0  76   0 -   392 nanosl ?        00:00:00 vmstat


OK Henrik, now i have no hobbitd running and everything looks fine. Great!
I will also check out your patch in the next time.

:-)) Thanks! 
Michael 



-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:henrik at hswn.dk]
Gesendet: Dienstag, 25. Oktober 2005 12:51
An: hobbit at hswn.dk
Betreff: Re: [hobbit] increasing no. of hobbitd zombie's


On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 11:57:57AM +0200, Heinecke at hansenet.com wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> every "checkpoint-interval" i get a new hobbitd zombie process.
>  
> #> ps auxwww 
> ----snip ---
> hobbit   25559  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        Z    11:06   0:00 [hobbitd] <defunct>
> hobbit   25917  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        Z    11:16   0:00 [hobbitd] <defunct>
> hobbit   26283  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        Z    11:26   0:00 [hobbitd] <defunct>
> hobbit   26648  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        Z    11:36   0:00 [hobbitd] <defunct>

You're right that it is related to the checkpoint'ing - hobbitd forks a
child process to save the checkpoint file.

What I don't understand is why it isn't cleaned up afterwards. Could you
do a "ps -lw -u hobbit" ? I'm curious to see what the PPID is for these
zombies.

> This happens on Debian LINUX 3.1 'Sarge'. Analog config on different Solaris 8 SPARC Boxes => no problem.
>  
> On the Debian box, i have DISABLED bbdisplay in hobbitlaunch.cfg, because this box should only act as a kind of LAN probe (only bb-net and forwarding of LAN client stati to a central bbdisplay)

In that case you don't need hobbitd running at all.

Hmm - perhaps this happens because there are no messages sent to this
hobbitd instance. I think that's the cause - looking over the code it
seems that if no messages arrive, the code to clean up the child
processes is never reached.

The attached patch should fix it, although it is of course a non-issue
if you stop hobbitd on this box.

Regards,
Henrik