I’ve had a fair amount of instability since getting my new machine. One of the issues is that the entire machine will lock up, requiring a reboot.
The last time this happened, I logged into my laptop with ssh from the Pro via terminal (MacCampers know how to do this now, too!) and killed the process “windowserver” to force a logout. This resolved the locked up screen.
In the process of rebooting, I noticed a number of zombie processes named (AddressBookSync).
Some research found an Apple Discussions thread where someone had determined this was an artifact of Mail.app. Since 10.5.5, Mail has been creating these zombie processes. Eventually, the operating system runs out of resources and cannot create new processes, and then things stop working.
Quitting Mail.app kills the zombie processes.
For now, I suggest quitting Mail.app every hour or so to ensure you don’t run out of processes.
The process limit seems to be 266 as noted here
Activity Monitor does not show zombie processes. Using Terminal.app, you can enter:
ps -awxand look for process names that are wrapped in parenthesis.