this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Could be an instance of BSD where (so I hear) PIDs are assigned randomly from the unused numbers, or else the system has massive process churn going on elsewhere and the old timer is from a previous cycle of consecutive PIDs.

Some systems still have /proc/sys/kernel/pid_max set to something around 32768, so wrapping back to 0 can happen fairly often.

Given all the PIDs in the comic seem pretty low, it might even be as low as 1024 wherever this is.

(Yes, I know I'm taking this way too seriously.)