[7.885][NOTABUG][CLOSED] Lots of confd.plx zombie processes

Not sure whether this is a bug:

I found a lot of confd.plx processes on my homeasg. They are not permanently present but there are one or two zombie processes present on the box:

root     30295  2.6  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    14:42   0:01 [confd.plx]
root     30296  2.9  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    14:42   0:01 [confd.plx]

Now that processes disappered and I got two new ones:

root     30550 12.8  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    14:43   0:01 [confd.plx]
root     30559 14.4  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    14:43   0:01 [confd.plx]

0 kbr over 15 years ago

That's well observed, but it's not a bug, just a Confd Design Decision from the good old days of 7.100.
When a Confd-Worker process is terminated, it sends a SIGCHILD to it's parent process (that's the Confd Listener) and waits for the parent process to acknowledge that signal. That's the normal, expected behavior of processes under Unix/Posix. The State, in which the process is in while it waits for the acknowledgement, is called "Zombie" state for... eh... obviously a kind of strange humor led to this name. The Process isn't alive any more, it's actually not running, but on the other hand it isn't fully gone yet.It will be fully removed, as soon as the parent process acknowledges the SIGCHILD signal.
And that's what you see here: The parent (the Confd Listener) does not do this immediately. Instead it acknowledges when it does it's regular cleanup tasks or when a new connection arrives. In the meantime, you can see this Confd Zombie processes.

Nothing to worry about.
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0 Astaro Beta Bot over 15 years ago

Astaro Beta Report
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Version: 7.885
Type: NOTABUG
State: CLOSED
Reporter: nschiele
Contributor:  
MantisID: 
Target version: 
Fixed in version: 
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