Many processes are zombies

Does it happen every time? Or only at this session? Sometimes it's enough to have only one zombie and apps that depend on that zombie become zombies too. Try to investigate if it's common issue with the same app. Thanks

I rebooted, logged in, and checked the processes. They are zombies immediately. This bug is reproducible. They are the same eight processes:

gnome-at-visual
gnome-login-sou
gnome-power-man
gnome-volume-ma
jockey-gtk
metacity
pactl
xdg-user-dirs-g

My sound is working just fine with pulseaudio, and graphics are fine with nvidia-glx-177 and compiz.

Can you try to turn off some of the start-up apps in gnome-session-properties and try to reboot? Especially xdg-user-dirs-gnome and gnome-at-visual. Thanks

I can confirm this.
$ ps aux | grep defunct | awk '{print $11}'
[gnome-login-sou]
[gsynaptics-init]
[pactl]
[gnome-volume-ma]
[xdg-user-dirs-g]
[jockey-gtk]
[gnome-power-man]
[gnome-at-visual]

Steffen, please try to reproduce as mentioned in comment 4. Thanks

Turning off xdg-user-dirs-gtk-update and gnome-at-visual left five zombie processes:

jockey-gtk
pactl
gnome-login-sou
gnome-power-man
gnome-volume-ma

Turning off all options indeed had zero zombies, albeit with a crippled desktop. I ran each command manually, one by one, but they all came up with no zombies.

I then tried mixing it up a bit doing different combinations. In the end I tried the top half of the list, and then the bottom half. Both times I had at least a few zombies, which rules out the cause being an individual one of those processes.

Ok, then it's a real issue.

I can confirm this bug

ps -A output:

22372 ? 00:00:00 gnome-login-sou <defunct>
22389 ? 00:00:00 jockey-gtk <defunct>
22390 ? 00:00:00 pactl <defunct>
22391 ? 00:00:00 gnome-at-visual <defunct>
22393 ? 00:00:00 gnome-power-man <defunct>
22396 ? 00:00:00 xdg-user-dirs-g <defunct>
22400 ? 00:00:00 gnome-volume-ma <defunct>
22551 ? 00:00:00 sh <defunct>

Obviously I've removed all entries which are not zombie infected :D

 ps aux |grep \<defunct\>
jumala 5730 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 15:49 0:00 [gnome-power-man] <defunct>
jumala 5731 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 15:49 0:00 [pactl] <defunct>
jumala 5732 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 15:49 0:00 [gnome-volume-ma] <defunct>
jumala 5733 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 15:49 0:00 [jockey-gtk] <defunct>

Jockey-gtk isn't even supposed to be running, as it's been disabled, from the session properties.

same here intrepid A3 fresh amd64 install .

Same here, Ubuntu 8.04 with intrepid.

Noticed the issue only yesterday after an update. The same update caused another problem with Compiz, had to remove metacity to resolve that.

Same here - Intrepid Alpha 3 new install on AMD 64 (64bit Alt CD)

The duplicate bug #252702 notes that the zombies are present under gnome-session, but I seem to have x-session-manager instead. Could someone else post their output of ps axf? Thanks in advance.

Here's mine, as requested.

Thanks for that, it looks the same as mine. In any case, my best guess is gdm, so I'll file it against that. This also seems like an issue that needs to be fixed by release.

not likely a gdm issue, this one didn't changed for a while and there is no reason why gdm which is a system service should be responsive for user softwares

Marking as gnome-session. The duplicate had the zombies spawned from gnome-session, and the two logs here are from x-session-manager, which after looking at 'man x-session-manager', appears to be gnome-session.

You're correct Hew. x-session-manager is simply a symlink to gnome-session (via /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager)

Moving to fix released. For sometime now the updates in Intrepid have shown zero zombies on my install plus a number of other testers installs. Should anyone still be replicating the problem who has confirmed they have correctly synched their install to the latest Intrepid repos, please advise.

I think the problem still exists with Xsession when use gdm to login, at least in 12.04.5 LTS:
(Yeah I know the release is not officially supported any more, just in case anybody is interested to trace back)
(For the moment I leave the comment here, before somebody is sure this is related to some other issue)
------------------------------------------------------------------
Part of the command ps axjf (The full result of this command is in the attachment):
 1543 2227 1539 1539 ? -1 Sl 0 0:00 \_ /usr/lib/gdm/gdm-session-worker
 2227 2502 2502 2502 ? -1 Ssl 1001 0:00 \_ gnome-session --session=ubuntu
 2502 2547 2502 2502 ? -1 Z 1001 0:00 \_ [Xsession] <defunct>

The zombie Xsession process, listed with the ps -elf command:
$ ps -elf | grep defunct
1 Z theloginuser 2547 2502 0 80 0 - 0 exit 06:06 ? 00:00:00 [Xsession] <defunct>

The gnome-session parent process of the zombie, listed with the ps -elf command:
4 S theloginuser 2502 2227 0 80 0 - 98064 poll_s 06:06 ? 00:00:00 gnome-session --session=ubuntu
------------------------------------------------------------------
Version infomation:

$ apt-cache policy gnome-session
gnome-session:
  Installed: 3.2.1-0ubuntu8
  Candidate: 3.2.1-0ubuntu8
  Version table:
 *** 3.2.1-0ubuntu8 0
        500 http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/ubuntu/archive/ precise/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS
Release: 12.04
Codename: precise
------------------------------------------------------------------
There are reports on the Internet that this phenomenon may also occur in some old version of Fedora.