#137·ReLaXed

ReLaXed spawns defunct chrome processes

Author: jonathanasquierCreated Jul 1, 2019Updated Feb 22, 2026
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Hi, I'm using relaxed in nodeJS with a promise interface by spawning a relaxed child process. I recently crashed my production server with 32k+ defunct chrome processes.

I tried to tree-kill my own child process, browser.close() and tree-kill the process.pid in the program.buildOnce condition, but still it seems 4-5 chrome process are launched.

root     23736  0.5  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    19:57   0:00 [chrome] <defunct>
root     23748  0.8  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    19:57   0:00 [chrome] <defunct>
root     23752  0.3  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    19:57   0:00 [chrome] <defunct>
root     23765  6.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    19:57   0:00 [chrome] <defunct>

Right now the only way I've got to prevent my server from crashing is restarting my docker container every once and a while, which destroys the chrome processes (I'm the one who wrote the dockerfile that is referenced in ReLaXed's README :) )

I have no experience with working directly with puppeteer and would be delighted with a little help!

Thanks!

PS: please don't let me use wkhtmltopdf again!!