Hi kyyhkyen,
I followed your guide, and everything seems to be working fine. However, when I followed your steps to lower the disk activity (e.g. the mods to /etc/crontabs/root , /etc/inittab, /etc/ntp.conf ) I now have a bunch of defuct (zombie) processes.
[root@SAN ~]# ps -ef | grep defunct | more
root 236 1 0 00:07 ? 00:00:00 [sshd] <defunct>
root 681 1 0 00:07 ttyS0 00:00:00 [S20wdc-fan-test] <defunct>
root 746 1 0 00:08 ? 00:00:00 [ntpd] <defunct>
root 750 1 0 00:08 ? 00:00:00 [inetd] <defunct>
root 754 1 0 00:08 ? 00:00:00 [mDNSResponderPo] <defunct>
www-data 761 1 0 00:08 ? 00:00:00 [lighttpd] <defunct>
root 775 1 0 00:08 ? 00:00:00 [crond] <defunct>
root 789 1 0 00:08 ? 00:00:00 [start-stop-daem] <defunct>
root 794 1 0 00:08 ? 00:00:00 [start-stop-daem] <defunct>
root 802 1 0 00:08 ? 00:00:00 [grep] <defunct>
root 822 1 0 00:08 ? 00:00:00 [smartctl] <defunct>
root 905 1 0 00:08 ? 00:00:00 [cat] <defunct>
root 908 1 0 00:08 ? 00:00:00 [cat] <defunct>
root 1539 858 0 00:15 pts/0 00:00:00 grep defunct
I have tried killing the parent process, but they don't go away. They also come back after boot.
What is even more strange, is that I put the files (e.g. /etc/crontabs/root , /etc/inittab, /etc/ntp.conf ) that I modded back to the way they originally were. But still the same processes are defunct after rebooting.
What is also interesting is if I move the offending start file out of /etc/init.d/ (e.g. ntp.sh), then reboot, the move it back to /etc/inti.d and then start it, it does not spawn a zombie process.
It seems that the mods to /etc/crontabs/root , /etc/inittab, /etc/ntp.conf (although now reverted back to thier original state) have done something to some processes that get started at boot time.
Any ideas …. ?