pfSense too many processes

bbrendon

We had a 2.4.5-p1 unit go crazy recently because it had too many processes. It ran out of memory and was unmanageable. Luckily the VPN was still up and I was able to login to the UPS and power cycle the whole shebang.

Anyway, that lead to us looking for too many processes on units. I found an sg3100 2.4.5-p1 with 81 defunct processes. It looks like when more defunct processes appear, they come in about groups of 20 or so.

Gertjan

These processes have name ?

bbrendon

From the ps(1) man page:

When printing using the command keyword, a	process	that has exited	and
     has a parent that has not yet waited for the process (in other words, a
     zombie) is	listed as "<defunct>", and a process which is blocked while
     trying to exit is listed as "<exiting>".

Gertjan

You mean you actually see that word, defunct and not the name of the process that waits / died ?
Run

ps ax

to see all process.

I never (or very rarely) saw such a process(s)using the top command :

last pid: 44778;  load averages:  0.22,  0.17,  0.16                                                                                                                                   up 3+22:33:40  07:32:52
91 processes:  1 running, 90 sleeping
CPU:  0.2% user,  3.1% nice,  0.4% system,  0.2% interrupt, 96.2% idle
Mem: 56M Active, 1415M Inact, 19M Laundry, 358M Wired, 190M Buf, 83M Free
Swap: 4096M Total, 99M Used, 3996M Free, 2% Inuse

bbrendon

Yes!

Gertjan

This is a recent, clean install ?
You use packages ? If so, what happens if you disable them all ?