Zombie process using CPU

[John Tapsell]

On 20 April 2010 14:27, Ike Panhc <ike.pan at canonical.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> IIRC zombie process is waiting for his parent process to end him.
>
> If I see an zombie process, I will use "pstree" to find his parent
> process and see what I can do. Maybe kill the parent process.

Ah I forgot to mention - I did indeed kill its parent and it became
re-parented to init.
So we had a zombie process whose parent is init.

John

> Hope its helpful.
>
> John Tapsell wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>>   After a program (vuze) crashed I ended up in the situation of having
>> a process, java, using 100% CPU of a core while also being a zombie.
>>
>>   Looking in /proc/<pid>/task  I saw two pids - the main task and a
>> subtask.  The main task (cat /proc/<pid>/task/<pid>/status ) was
>> indeed a zombie, but the subtask was still running and using CPU.
>>
>>   I could not find any way to kill this process. kill -9  on the <pid>
>>  and on the pid on the subtask did nothing.  In the end I had to
>> reboot.
>>
>>   is this situation supposed to be possible?  How do I kill a subtask?
>>
>> John
>>
>
>