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Sure. It's not that there's NO reason for it. But if the kernel writers thought there'd be lots of them, they would do something to reduce the amount of memor
by radford-neal 9y ago
Sure. It's not that there's NO reason for it. But if the kernel writers thought there'd be lots of them, they would do something to reduce the amount of memory - eg, apply some data compression method to them, at least once they've been around a while (so that there would be no performance impact in typical usage).
- tankenmate 9y agoI have a strong suspicion that the minimum process size on Windows NT is 64kB (between kernel and user pages, for Intel platforms anyway). So if you didn't treat a zombie process as "just another process" for management purposes you'd have to start having all sorts of exceptions in some very base level code (page tables, scheduler, system statistics and reporting, etc etc) just to clean up after other people who can't or won't code properly. I just can't see a kernel engineer agreeing that this was a sane thing to do (I can image how someone with a temperament like Linus would respond!).
- radford-neal 9y agoCould be. But if it were a really big issue, I'd think that the minimum process size could be reduced, which might be a useful change in any case. After all, on the first Unix system I used, 64K was the MAXIMUM process size... The point is that there are always tradeoffs, whose resolution is affected by how important an issue is perceived to be.