logresolvemerge.pl does not reap its children

[Chris Jones]

Binary package hint: awstats

It seems that logresolvemerge.pl forks gzip for each of the zipped logfiles it's reading, but does not reap them when they have finished, leading to as many zombie processes as there were log files.

While this is not directly harmful, it does make system monitoring trickier.

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please answer these questions:
1. Is this reproducible?
2. If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug? Be as detailed as possible.
This will help us to find and resolve the problem.

[Chris Jones (cmsj)]

Chuck: It's completely reproducible, you just need to run an awstats job:

a) on a busy website's logs
b) using logresolvemerge.pl to bring together the logs from multiple hosts, e.g. LogFile="/usr/share/doc/awstats/examples/logresolvemerge.pl /path/to/server1/access.log* /path/to/server2/access.log* |"

What seems to happen is that the gzip processes used to unpack the logs and feed into logresolvemerge.pl exit, but are not acknowledged while awstats.pl works, so they are technically zombies.

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

Thanks for the info Chris.

chuck