Process stuck in exit, shows as zombie but cannot be reaped

Question

I have a process that\'s monitored by its parent. The child encountered an error that caused it to call abort. The process does not tamper with the abort proces

Answer 1

I finally figured it out! The process was actually doing useful work all this time. The process held the last reference to a large file on a slow filesystem. When the process terminates, the last reference to the file is release, forcing the OS to reclaim the space. The file was so large that this required tens of thousands of I/O operations, taking 10 minutes or more.