Defunct processes are corrupted processes that can no longer communicate between the parent and child one. Sometimes, they become “zombies” and remain in your system until you reboot your machine. You can try to apply “kill -9” command, but most of the time you’ll be out of luck.
In order to kill theses defunct processes, you have two choices:
1. Reboot your computer
2. Continue reading…
First, let’s find out if the system contains defunct process:
$ ps -A | grep defunct
Assume your output is as the following:
8328 ? 00:00:00 mono <defunct>
8522 ? 00:00:01 mono <defunct>
13132 ? 00:00:00 mono <defunct>
25822 ? 00:00:00 ruby <defunct>
28383 ? 00:00:00 ruby <defunct>
18803 ? 00:00:00 ruby <defunct>
This means you have 6 defunct processes: 3 of mono, and 3 of ruby. These processes exists because of poorly written application or unusual action taken by the user, in my case there must be some serious problem with the program I wrote in mono C#