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Linux, waitpid, WNOHANG, child process, zombie

kill linux process waitpid zombie-process

mac13k

edited 01 Oct, 2015

Cube

asked 29 Mar, 2014

I running my program as daemon.

Father process only wait for child process, when it is dead unexpected, fork and wait again.

for (; 1;) {
  if (fork() == 0) break;
  int sig = 0;
  for (; 1; usleep(10000)) {
    pid_t wpid = waitpid(g->pid[1], &sig, WNOHANG);
    if (wpid > 0) break;
    if (wpid < 0) print("wait error: %sn", strerror(errno));
  }
}

But when child process being killed with -9 signal, the child process goes to zombie process.

waitpid should return the pid of child process immediately!
But waitpid got the pid number after about 90 seconds,

cube     28139  0.0  0.0  70576   900 ?        Ss   04:24   0:07 ./daemon -d
cube     28140  9.3  0.0      0     0 ?        Zl   04:24 106:19 [daemon] <defunct>

Here is the strace of the father

The father does not get stuck, wait4 was called always.

strace -p 28139
Process 28139 attached - interrupt to quit
restart_syscall(<... resuming interrupted call ...>) = 0
wait4(28140, 0x7fff08a2681c, WNOHANG, NULL) = 0
nanosleep({0, 10000000}, NULL)          = 0
wait4(28140, 0x7fff08a2681c, WNOHANG, NULL) = 0

About 90 seconds later father got the SIGCHILD and wait4 returned the pid of the dead child.

--- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---
restart_syscall(<... resuming interrupted call ...>) = 0
wait4(28140, [{WIFSIGNALED(s) && WTERMSIG(s) == SIGKILL}], WNOHANG, NULL) = 28140

Why the child process does not exit immediately? On the contrary, it turns into zombie unexpectedly.

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Answer

I finally find out there were some fd leaks during deep tracing by lsof.

After fd leaks were fixed, the problem was gone.

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