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10.5: Mail, sent messages, and zombie process problems
Authored by: bloodnok on Feb 23, '09 10:13:13PM
the ps output shown in this hint gives no indication that these processes are zombies. ?? just means the process isn't attached to a terminal. that's perfectly normal. in all UNIX systems, including osx, a zombie process is marked with a Z. its parent process will always be 1 (init). try a ps -aux & see if there are any zombies from that output.

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10.5: Mail, sent messages, and zombie process problems
Authored by: robg on Feb 24, '09 05:54:45AM

You are correct; I used the wrong term. They're not really zombies (as they do vanish when you quit Mail, and my understanding of a zombie is that it wouldn't do that), but they are apparently dead processes that are spawned then not killed off each time you send a message.

I've modified the hint and title to be more accurate; thanks for the catch.

-rob



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10.5: Mail, sent messages, and zombie process problems
Authored by: michaeljs on Feb 24, '09 12:08:26PM
Oh, they most certainly are zombies on my system:
  501   308    79   0   0:08.97 ??         0:46.35 /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail -psn_0_180268            4000  63  0  1016868  64384 -      U    700a4f4
  501 18460   308   0   0:00.00 ??         0:00.00 (AddressBookSync)                                                   6000   0  0        0      0 -      Z    d01082c
  501 18463   308   0   0:00.00 ??         0:00.00 (AddressBookSync)                                                   6000   0  0        0      0 -      Z    8a626fc


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10.5: Mail, sent messages, and zombie process problems
Authored by: bloodnok on Feb 25, '09 10:36:43AM

note i didn't say these processes weren't zombies, only that the way they were shown in the hint didn't indicate it one way or the other. since i don't use mail.app, i've not had this issue.

that mail.app spawns a huge number of children & then fails to reap their status is extremely poor programming practice. given osx threads, i'm amazed they've resorted to something as cack-handed as this. if users are complaining about these children clogging their process table to the point of failed app launches, a bug probably needs to be filed at bugreport.apple.com.



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