When doing a 'top' on my Linux server I see that some cgi processes have a <defunc> message. What does this mean?

A defunct process is a zombie process. The man page says:

> Processes marked <defunct> are dead processes
> (so-called "zombies") that remain because their
> parent has not destroyed them properly. These
> processes will be destroyed by init(8) if the parent
> process exits.

While a few defunct processes are not generally a problem, if you have a lot of them, they do take up spots in the process table.

If Apache is the parent process, restarting the Apache process may eliminate them and make things cleaner to look at.

--Erika Stokes

Originally posted by erika
While a few defunct processes are not generally a problem
--Erika Stokes

Only a few defunction processes are not problem; which means if there are defunct processes, there likely be problems.

Mine is weird. The server was runing well without defunct processes the last minute; and suddently it gives many defunct processes the next minutes without any modification made to the server. :(