From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
Cc: hanche@math.ntnu.no, kbrown@cornell.edu, emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Zombie subprocesses
Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2012 01:45:46 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <50B0974A.7040201@cs.ucla.edu> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <83wqxbs811.fsf@gnu.org>
On 11/24/2012 12:46 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Is leaving zombie processes here and there really worse than the
> conflict with GTK-launched subprocesses?
My impression is yes, as the zombies can exhaust process slots,
which means the user won't be able to run subprocesses.
This could happen pretty quickly on a system where the number
of processes that a single user can run is limited to a small
number, for quota or other reasons (ulimit -u). On the system
I happened to be running on when I was typing this message,
the limit was 100 processes per user. This is pretty low,
but it's not ridiculously low.
In contrast, the conflict with GTK-launched subprocesses means
that GTK won't report proper exit statuses and will chatter
misleading messages to the user. This is a real bug, sometimes
fairly serious, but still, it's typically less serious than not being
able to run subprocesses at all.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2012-11-24 9:45 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 11+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2012-11-23 21:49 Zombie subprocesses Harald Hanche-Olsen
2012-11-23 22:23 ` Paul Eggert
2012-11-23 22:33 ` Ken Brown
2012-11-24 6:19 ` Eli Zaretskii
2012-11-24 8:24 ` Chong Yidong
2012-11-24 8:26 ` Paul Eggert
2012-11-24 8:46 ` Eli Zaretskii
2012-11-24 9:45 ` Paul Eggert [this message]
2012-11-24 10:10 ` Harald Hanche-Olsen
2012-11-27 2:36 ` Paul Eggert
2012-11-24 5:51 ` James Cloos
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