Zombie SAS process on Windows server

[tlk]

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

[Kurt_Bremser]

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.

[tlk]

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

[jakarman]

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).

[TriciaAanderud]

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