Killing Defunct UV processes in Linux

MITS has been working directly with Rocket UniVerse Support over many months, but have been unable to locate the root cause of issue that can leave defunct UV processes running in Linux.

Rocket Support has found the UniVerse process is waiting for an unknown input in these situations. MITS has attempted to capture the events leading to this situation at the OS level in Linux, and within the UniVerse environment itself but with no success.

MITS has developed the following workaround to regularly check the system for these defunct processes and kill them.

While MITS has tested and used the process below on many internal systems and on customer sites, it is always up to you and your IT staff to review and implement this workaround on your server at your own discretion.

Create a crontab job that runs every X hours that executes the following command which terminates the orphaned defunct process:

kill -4 ps ax -o user -o state -o ppid | awk '/^mits/ && $2 == "Z" {print $3}' 2>/dev/null


• Replace "mits" with the user that the defunct process is running under

Prior to setting this up, execute the command manually without the kill -4 option to confirm that this is locating the correct PPID.

This will kill any defunct processes owned by the specified user at the scheduled.