237479 - Mozilla leaves zombies

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Vincent Lefevre]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux ppc; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040313
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux ppc; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040313

When I use Mozilla, I get more and more mozilla-bin zombies. I couldn't find the
cause of the problem.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start Mozilla.
2. Use it (open URLs...).
Actual Results:  
One gets mozilla-bin zombie processes. Here I've got 4 just after starting Mozilla.

Expected Results:  
Mozilla should wait for its children.

The process tree currently looks like this:

[...]
    6813  /bin/sh /home/lefevre/mozilla/bin/mozilla
      6817  /bin/sh /home/lefevre/mozilla/lib/mozilla-1.7b/run-mozilla.sh /home/
        6838  /home/lefevre/mozilla/lib/mozilla-1.7b/mozilla-bin
          6840  /home/lefevre/mozilla/lib/mozilla-1.7b/mozilla-bin
            6841  /home/lefevre/mozilla/lib/mozilla-1.7b/mozilla-bin
            6844  [mozilla-bin] <defunct>
            6845  /home/lefevre/mozilla/lib/mozilla-1.7b/mozilla-bin
            6848  [mozilla-bin] <defunct>
            6849  [mozilla-bin] <defunct>
            6851  [mozilla-bin] <defunct>
            6852  [mozilla-bin] <defunct>
            6912  [mozilla-bin] <defunct>
            6913  [mozilla-bin] <defunct>
            6914  [mozilla-bin] <defunct>
            7189  [mozilla-bin] <defunct>
            7190  [mozilla-bin] <defunct>
[...]

Mozilla has been running for 15 hours, and I currently have 147 zombies:
ay:~> ps -aef|grep "mozilla.*defunct[>]"|wc -l
147

Comment 1

[David Swegen]

I'm seeing this on firefox/linux also (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US;
rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040411 Firefox/0.8.0+).

Comment 2

[Vincent Lefevre]

Now, I'm not sure that this is a bug in Mozilla. It could also be a kernel bug;
it seems to be related to the kernel anyway, as after doing some tests, I
noticed that zombies appear only with the 2.4.18 kernel on my PowerBook (but not
with 2.4.25 on the same machine). And other programs are affected by the same
problem (still on the 2.4.18 kernel only): mysqld and ogg123.

Dave, what is your kernel?

Comment 3

[Vincent Lefevre]

I've done some searches on Google groups and the problem could be related to
noflushd and ext3 (search for
  zombies noflushd ext3
on Google groups for more information). I'll try without noflushd...

Comment 4

[David Swegen]

OK, just upgraded from 2.4.21 (where I was seeing this) to 2.6.5 and the problem
seems to have disappeared. As it happens I was/am also running noflushd.

I did a search for noflushd and zombies, and the noflushd bug report for this
(at
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=695613&group_id=12257&atid=112257)
 indicates that the problem has been fixed in kernels 2.4.23 and later.

So it would seem that this isn't a Moz bug.

Comment 5

[Vincent Lefevre]

OK, so I'm closing the bug.

Comment 6

[Xanthor Sccas]

*** Bug 237898 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***