[ale] Unresponsive orphaned processes (PPID of 1)

[cfowler at outpostsentinel.com (Christopher Fowler)]

It all depends.  Is it locked in a system call?  Waiting on I/O from an
unresponsive device.  

If a parent is still around when a child dies the zombie will remain
util that parent or the grandfather aknowledges its death.  The memory
is freed all that is hanging around is a process table entry.

On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 08:28, John Wells wrote:
> I know I asked this question some time ago, but didn't get a definitive
> answer and my googling has reaped nothing so far.
> 
> What can you do to kill a process that has been orphaned, or is orphaned
> when you try to kill it?  Occasionally, I see this with different
> processes, most often multimedia and probably IO bound.  The only reponse
> you get from kill -9 is the process dropping it's PPID and switching it to
> 1, if it hadn't already been switched to 1.  Nothing seems to kill it.  It
> simply won't respond to the kill sigs.
> 
> I've occasionally had to resort to rebooting in order to rid myself of
> these processes and free up the resources they're blocking access to. 
> There *HAS* to be a better way.
> 
> Anyone know?
> 
> Thanks,
> John
> 
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