title: Killing a java zombie process
body: <p>I am running an experimental java application and every time I kill or stop the application, zombie processes get created. I know zombies are not really an issue as they (supposedly) will not consume resources. However, my RAM free space gets significantly less than it should be. Here is the dump of </p>
  
  <pre><code>ps aux | grep java
  
  3052  8.5  0.0      0     0 ?        Zl   Sep24 127:24 [java] &lt;defunct&gt;
  6644  0.9  0.0      0     0 ?        Zl   Sep24  13:20 [java] &lt;defunct&gt;
  8325  0.7  0.0      0     0 ?        Zl   Sep24  11:01 [java] &lt;defunct&gt;
  8954  0.7  0.0      0     0 ?        Zl   Sep24  11:01 [java] &lt;defunct&gt;
  16229  1.3  0.0      0     0 ?        Zl   Sep24  16:57 [java] &lt;defunct&gt;
  19222  106  0.0      0     0 ?        Zl   Sep24 1346:37 [java] &lt;defunct&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>None of the following works :(</p>
  
  <pre><code>kill -9 PID , kill -1 PID, kill -KILL PID 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I cannot reboot my machine! so I would highly welcome any solutions.</p>