Zombies are basically the leftover bits of dead processes that haven’t been cleaned up properly.
What’s a Zombie Process?
This allows the parent process to get information from the dead process.
After wait() is called, the zombie process is completely removed from memory.
This normally happens very quickly, so you won’t see zombie processes accumulating on your system.
Utilities like GNOME System Monitor, thetopcommand, and thepscommand display zombie processes.
Dangers of Zombie Processes
Zombie processes don’t use up any system resources.
(Actually, each one uses a very tiny amount of system memory to store its process descriptor.)
However, each zombie process retains its process ID (PID).
Linux systems have a finite number of process IDs – 32767 by default on 32-bit systems.
However, there are a few ways you could get rid of zombie processes.
One way is by sending the SIGCHLD signal to the parent process.
You’ll have to kill or exit the zombies' parent process.
When the process that created the zombies ends, init inherits the zombie processes and becomes their new parent.
(init is the first process started on Linux at boot and is assigned PID 1.)
you could restart the parent process after closing it.
File a bug report if a program on your system keeps creating zombies.
