I recently moved a debian 3.0(?) system to new hardware and while i was at it, i decided to upgrade the version of debian.

This server is used to host our CVS server. It also hosts a number of websites, and also runs cvsweb.

The problem I am seeing is a lot of cvs and "runcvs" (a little script that allows access to the various cvs repositories from cvsweb). These currently go back to last time the system was booted, and nothing has changed since. There are maybe 40-odd processes there. The CVS co/ci shouldnt take long so anything more than a day is definately defunt.

Some are actually zombie processes, as they have STATE = Z, but others have STATE= S or STATE=Ss

Basically I want to stop this happening, but I am not sure where to start with it....

To which version of Debian did you upgrade? What version of CVS are you running? Looked at the logs? .....

Apologies. Actually clicked submit before i thought of adding those details:

buzz:~# uname -a
Linux buzz 2.6.18-6-686 #1 SMP Sun Feb 10 22:11:31 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
buzz:~# cat /etc/deb
debconf.conf debian_version
buzz:~# cat /etc/debian_version
4.0

buzz:~# dpkg --list | grep cvs
ii cvs 1.11.1p1debian-9woody7 Concurrent Versions System
ii cvsweb 1.112-1 a CGI interface to your CVS repository

I was forced to use CVS 1.11.1p1 (which I couldnt find for Sarge,, so ended up using the woody package). I think the people in charge of the server were afraid their custom app (built in house by someone years ago).

Obviously this could probably be the issue, but the thing is its not all processes, it just happens every now and again and can be once every few days or multiple times a day.