topic Re: Zombie SAS process on Windows server in Administration and Deployment

Zombie SAS process on Windows server

tlk — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 13:57:57 GMT

Hello,

We have SAS EBI on a windows server. The server admin is worried about the amount of SAS process, some of them were started weeks ago. We decided to try to schedule a restart of the Object Spawner, every Sunday morning, so all the SAS process spawned would be kill. It worked for some of them. Here is our batch file:

net stop "SAS [SASCONFIG-Lev1] Object Spawner"

TIMEOUT /T 60 /NOBREAK

net start "SAS [SASCONFIG-Lev1] Object Spawner"

Are missing something ?

Is there another way to clean up those zombie process ?

Thanks!

Laurent

Re: Zombie SAS process on Windows server

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 14:04:26 GMT

Sometimes a client is disconnected from a Workspace Server process in a way that causes it to hang completely. Normal termination signals will not work at all. On UNIX, this means to use kill -9, which causes the kernel to deallocate the process without any cooperation from the process itself.

There must be a similar radical command in Windows.

Re: Zombie SAS process on Windows server

tlk — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 14:49:15 GMT

As far as I know the kill command in Windows behave the same as kill -9 on UNIX. Is there a way to identify those process ? Can I find way to know if a client is still connected to the process.

Thanks

Re: Zombie SAS process on Windows server

jakarman — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 15:09:55 GMT

When the processes are real zombies they will not go away when the initiator (object spawner) is gone.

The root cause can be a hangup in the closing part.

Similar radical commands exist in Windows PsTools (TechNet) PSkill -Taskkill lseems to be a normal interenal command. On my W7 it is giving a reaction. /F as -9 switch.
If you are worried think on restarting all serverice and validate the machine is clean and setup on a regular planned schedule moment.

There are a lot of sasprocesess that are services (multithreaded).

Re: Zombie SAS process on Windows server

TriciaAanderud — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 12:19:13 GMT

Zencos has a helpful video about locating these processes: How to Detect Zombie Sessions