Do Zombie Process have adverse effects?

Question

Yes, I have gone through a lot of answers, but they don't really specifically say if Zombie Processes will have any adverse effects in the longer run or not.

I have an application that creates a child on new connection and the child performs certain task, closes the connection and exits. Then the process becomes a Zombie.

I know all the resources have been freed, so there is no worry on that part.
I know the parent application needs to be written properly so that it will either wait or handle the signal properly.

However, are there any adverse effects (in longer run) if I just choose not to handle those properly (besides it affecting my conscience and code quality)

Which operating system, presumably Linux? – John Mahowald Jul 14 '18 at 15:54 — John Mahowald, Jul 14 '18 at 15:54
@JohnMahowald, yes, linux. I'm using CentOS and Ubuntu. – Dushyant Bangal Jul 16 '18 at 04:18 — Dushyant Bangal, Jul 16 '18 at 04:18

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 17 '18 at 12:58

Not cleaning up your child processes is distracting to the operators of your program. A sysadmin not familiar with zombie processes will be annoyed that there is a process that stays around but cannot be terminated. (It is already undead.)

Its not really a resource problem, as the memory should be freed already, and there can be a very large number of PIDs on the system.

Do Zombie Process have adverse effects?

1 Answers1