child_process.spawn() dropping SIGCHLD

[eahutchins]

I've got a CI system running on node v0.10.26 (+some in-house patches to aid in proxy debugging which I can't see causing any trouble in this case) which does a lot of child_process.spawn() calls, and I'm getting hangs where none of the child events get fired but the spawned process is a zombie. This is only happening so far on debian-7 instances running on google compute engine (Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.54-2 x86_64), and it only seems to be happening on short-lived processes (e.g. ln, git fetch when a repo is up-to-date).

This could obviously be any number of things in my patched version of node and the cloud instance I'm running on, but I was hoping someone had run into something similar and could give me some pointers. Am I right in assuming node should always be getting the SIGCHLD and firing some kind of event rather than sitting idle with a zombie? Is there a way to turn on low-level debugging for signal handling and/or uv_spawn? Thanks for any help...

[eahutchins]

It seems like the SIGCHLD does get through eventually, but only after a long time (many minutes) of the child process sitting around as a zombie. Weird. Probably a GCE problem.