Nagios defunct processes

[Marc Powell]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: nagios-users-bounces at lists.sourceforge.net [mailto:nagios-users-
> bounces at lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Mark Frasa
> Sent: Friday, January 19, 2007 10:21 AM
> To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] Nagios defunct processes
> 
> On Fri, 19 Jan 2007 10:05:51 -0600
> "Marc Powell" <marc at ena.com> wrote:
> 
> >

[chop]

> > And do your defunct processes go away after 10 seconds?
> >
> > --
> > Marc
> 
> Hello,
> 
> The little ones i pasted go away even faster, but you are orientating
on
> the wrong part of my question :)
> The real problem is that this process:
> 
> nagios   14417  2593  0 Jan16 ?        00:00:00 [nagios <defunct>]

I'm not necessarily on the wrong track but admittedly this is a grey
area for me. Others on the list (Andreas Ericsson for example) have a
better understanding of the internals of this process than I. My
understanding is that nagios forks child/grandchild process for each
service check that it executes and sends results up via IPC pipe.

   [nagios parent] (fork)-> [nagios child] (fork)-> [nagios grandchild]
(fork)-> [plugin]

A defunct process is one in which the parent has not yet released the
child process. Logically, the nagios grandchild will release the plugin
after it executes and then the child will release the grandchild after
processing its results on up to the top so something would appear to be
preventing that release.

> The real problem is that this process:
> 
> nagios   14417  2593  0 Jan16 ?        00:00:00 [nagios <defunct>]
> 
> Will last there until we kill -HUP kill -9 and restart nagios.
> And while this process stays defunct nagios is acting like there are
two
> instances running.

This is a child process of parent 2593. Is 2593 your master nagios
daemon? In the end the grandchild should be owned by init, not nagios. I
am presuming that you've stopped nagios and have verified that you
really don't have multiple master processes running. What OS and nagios
version are you seeing this on?

--
Marc

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