I am facing an issue where once I issued a reload to the NGinX binary, few of the older worker processes are not dying. They still remain orphaned.

This is the configuration before issuing a reload :

[poduser@ucfc2z3a-1582-lb8-nginx1 logs]$ ps -ef | grep nginx
poduser 12540 22030 0 06:39 ? 00:00:00 nginx: worker process
poduser 12541 22030 0 06:39 ? 00:00:00 nginx: worker process
poduser 12762 11601 0 06:41 pts/0 00:00:00 grep nginx
poduser 22030 1 1 May12 ? 00:49:01 nginx: master process /u01/app/Oracle_Nginx/sbin/nginx
poduser 23528 22030 0 May12 ? 00:00:22 nginx: worker process
poduser 24950 22030 0 May12 ? 00:00:22 nginx: worker process

Configuration after issuing a relaod

[poduser@ucfc2z3a-1582-lb8-nginx1 logs]$ ps -ef | grep nginx
poduser 13280 22030 2 06:45 ? 00:00:00 nginx: worker process
poduser 13281 22030 2 06:45 ? 00:00:00 nginx: worker process
poduser 13323 11601 0 06:45 pts/0 00:00:00 grep nginx
poduser 22030 1 1 May12 ? 00:49:02 nginx: master process /u01/app/Oracle_Nginx/sbin/nginx
poduser 23528 22030 0 May12 ? 00:00:22 nginx: worker process
poduser 24950 22030 0 May12 ? 00:00:22 nginx: worker process

If you notice, there are two worker processes orphaned with PID's 23528 and 24950. Could someone please explain the cause for this, as to why few of the worker processes are orphaned?