I search on the internet and on the forum. Many suggest when encountering a defunct process, what to do with it is to kill its parent process. However, in the following case it looks like I have to kill the init process. That means to reboot? Or what to do would be better in dealing with such problem?

Many thanks,

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I have to do this fairly often because Adobe Flash Player is a piece of garbage.

Don't kill the init process!

Processes that die sit in a "zombie" state waiting for their parents to "reap" them. This is done specifically so that the parent can reliably obtain final-status information. If the parents do not do this, a certain (but not unlimited) number of defunct processes can sit around for a while.

If the parent process dies, the children are briefly parented to "init," which will reap them.

"init" is a very special process that cannot die. Don't mess with it.

Don't be alarmed about a certain number of defuncts in the process table. They actually do no real harm.

That is the problem. When I try to kill the its parent process. The parent process dies, but the zombie process then becomes child process of init; and it won't go away if I issue command e.g `kill -9 9993` where 9993 is the zomebie process I want to kill.

If I try e.g. kill -9 9993, the command looks works successfully. But when using `ps -ef | grep ...' command, the process is always there. Is there any way I can exactly kill it (though I think kill -9 is the only way I can do)?

Thanks your help.

But I saw the CPU usage is increasing. And the sound of my laptop becomes loudly. So we don't actually have any way to get rid of that zombie process?


Thanks your reply,

I appreciate it.