Ridiculously high PID numbers

  • Thread starter Thread starter loser_1
  • Start date Start date
L

loser_1

Greetings,

I have now seen this on two different PCs. If left on for a day or
so, all of a sudden new processes will have PID numbers in the 100s of
thousands (like 300000 - 450000). Rebooting corrects the problem.
I'm pretty good at detecting spyware, and both systems are pretty
clean. I run netstat, and there are no illicit connections.
ProcessExplorer doesn't show anything, either. I figure it's some
kind of weird memory leak, but I can't seem to find the right keywords
to search, so I'm posting here.

Has anyone seen this before?
 
A very large PID does not necessarily mean that there are anywhere near that
many processes on a system. This is because such numbers are often a result
of the fact that PIDs are not immediately reused, in order to prevent
possible errors.

The default maximum value of PIDs is 32,767. This maximum is important
because it is essentially the maximum number of processes that can exist
simultaneously on a system. Although this will almost always be sufficient
for a small system, large servers may require many more processes. The lower
the maximum value, the sooner the values will wrap around, meaning that lower
values do not necessarily indicate processes that started to run earlier.
PID is used to identify processes
http://www.linfo.org/pid.html
 
A very large PID does not necessarily mean that there are anywhere near that
many processes on a system. This is because such numbers are often a result
of the fact that PIDs are not immediately reused, in order to prevent
possible errors.

The default maximum value of PIDs is 32,767. This maximum is important
because it is essentially the maximum number of processes that can exist
simultaneously on a system. Although this will almost always be sufficient
for a small system, large servers may require many more processes. The lower
the maximum value, the sooner the values will wrap around, meaning that lower
values do not necessarily indicate processes that started to run earlier.
PID is used to identify processeshttp://www.linfo.org/pid.html
Click to expand...

I also have a 64-bit box that get high number. When I run the
performance monitor on that box the objects-> processes show an
regular increase of around 1000 process by hour. I have not found yet
what cause those processes to appear and they do not show in the task
manager
 
I too see these very high PID numbers but my system is XP Pro and its 32 bit,
not 64 bit. Typically the PID numbers range up to a value of around 6,000,
but then every now and again I'll see a group of tasks including taskmgr with
values in the 100,000 and 200,000 range - usually there are about 6 or 7
tasks with these sort of numbers and all the others have 'standard' numbers.
I do have 2 GB of memory on the system and typically 110 or so processes
running according to task manager (although memory usage rarely goes above
1.5 Gb even with VMWare) - this is a new system which I have just rebuilt a
couple of weeks ago and is bang up to date with all the latest fixes - i
believe it is clean of any viruses etc since it has up to date Norton and
ZoneAlarm Pro installed. I rebuilt the system because it was very unstable
and would go into random processor loops in some service (never could work
out which was the cause despite using ProcMon and ProExp). I'd love to hear
of any theories about the PID numbers.
 
Back
Top