Maarten Bezemer wrote on Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:43:06 +0200 (CEST):
It is normal for some services to terminate te main process, but leave active children alive.
That may be so, but Timo claimed the opposite (as I read his response). I'm merely pointing out that I cannot see the behavior that Timo states. If you want to get rid of all these processes you have to killall.
Especially for pop3 processes, as they can be
considered to terminate soon due to protocol design.
Can you elaborate on this? Also, have a look at the thread I mentioned. Dozens pop3-login processes were staying sleeping for 5 or more hours. There was no remote part anymore. Doesn't sound like they "terminated soon due to protocol design".
Same goes for ssh for
example. You can kill (stop, or restart) the main sshd, without killing the sessions currently running.
Yes. Right you are. And especially with ssh it's quite helpful ;-)
The "restarting after 2 seconds" thing I just saw in another mail can possibly be prevented by using the appropriate setsockopts on the listen port (SO_REUSEADDR in this case, if I'm not mistaken). This may however very well be a Linux-specific solution.
That concerns the "tidying up"? In my case it wasn't a problem with still occupied ports, I checked for presence of processes.
Kai
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