At 13:11 +0300 11 Sep 2023, Max Amelchenko [off-list ref] wrote:

Maybe it's connected also to the underlying infrastructure? We are
getting this in AWS lambda jobs and we're hitting a system limit of
max processes because of it.

Running as a lambda, or in a container, could definitely be why you're 
seeing a difference. Normally when a process is orphaned it gets adopted 
by `init` (PID 1), and that will take care of cleaning up after orphaned 
zombie processes.

But most of the time containers just run the configured process 
directly, without an init process. That leaves nothing to clean orphan 
processes.

Although for that to really be a problem, would require hitting that max 
process limit inside a single container invocation. Of course since 
containers usually aren't meant to be spawning a lot of processes, that 
limit might be a lot lower than on a normal system.

I know that Docker provides a way to include an init process in the 
started container (`docker run --init`), but I don't think that AWS 
Lambda does.