Forensics · 5 min
Two hundred processes and none of them running
What you were told
A supervisor forks a worker per job. The machine is idle, the jobs finished long ago, and the process table keeps growing. Killing them does nothing.
The machine is beside you as somebody handed it over. There is no trace — you did not start these processes, and on a real machine you would not have one either.
Diagnose
Why does killing them not work?