Bug#150631: #150631: apps spawning huge numbers of zombies and hanging: happens to non-glib apps too

[Philippe Troin]

Chris Boyle <cmb@debian.org> writes:

> A little help please, if you have a moment:
> 
> This bug (gradually spawning over 1000 zombies and then hanging) has
> been open for quite a while now is happening to iRATE as well, which I
> just downloaded from http://irate.sf.net/ , even the clients that don't
> touch glib/gtk at all, thus I no longer think it's glib's fault.
> Currently the problem happens to iRATE, xmms, gkrellmd, and sometimes
> gkrellm. It's also happened sometimes on a different machine with
> pppoa3, part of the user-mode speedtouch ADSL drivers from
> http://speedtouch.sf.net/ (version 1.2-beta1).
> 
> I'm guessing there's *something* in common here, and based on my limited
> understanding of this, it might be one of three things: libc6 (2.3.2 and
> 2.2.5), the kernel (2.4.23 and 2.4.22) or my hardware (on two separate
> machines). I don't like any of those possibilities. Any ideas or
> thoughts of any kind? Anyone? :-/
> 
> Apart from anything else, where do I reassign this to? I'm thinking
> libc6, being the "smallest" thing all these have in common, but that's a
> bit of a guess on my part.

Can you check the PPID for all the zombies? Is it another process or
is it /sbin/init (pid 1)?

See #223513 if the PPID is init.

Phil.