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Symptoms

  • Monitoring shows the process count on build-server-01 has been steadily increasing over 3 days.
  • The server currently has 4,200+ processes, most showing as <defunct> in ps.
  • New process creation is starting to slow down.
  • The CI/CD build agent spawns child processes for each build step.
  • The parent build agent process (PID 1842) has been running for 3 days without restart.
  • top shows 4,187 zombie processes.
  • System resources (CPU, memory) are not exhausted, but the PID space is filling up.