I'm developing a program (Grand parent process) that automatically relaunch a process (parent process) that calls two other processes (children processes) in case of errors.
If one of the children processes misbehave, the parent process try to close the application gracefully and the grand parent process restart everything. However, in case of bug or unexpected behavior, the grand parent process :
Due to probably a problem in my code, the parents processes survive as zombies and sometime I find my embedded linux with 12 or 20 zombies. I know that zombies use very little ressources (if I'm not mistaken : only their entry into the process table).
My question, is there a theoretical limit to zombies number ?
I believe the only negative effect of keeping Zombie processes around is that they take up space in the kernel process table. The max number of zombies you can keep around should be the max number of processes your kernel supports, which you can query with cat /proc/sys/kernel/pid_max