Recently I was playing with a fully Dockerized setup of Jenkins at work and found a curious issue there. Whenever Jenkins was polling the git server the side effect was that it created a zombie ssh process. The issue is actually remediated by the Jenkins team now by explicitly using a tiny init system called … tini started as the main container’s process instead of just starting Jenkins there. This tiny tini thing can properly adopt and reap the children. I was all like - wow, what a great blog entry is coming at me. I was planning to describe how zombies come to existence on Linux and why Docker should, in my opinion, provide an adopter-reaper by default and other very interesting things ! But then I found a really excellent article by the Phusion team here explaining all that and more. It is very good. You should read it. That is it. The end. Happy reaping !