Corrupt Spool Files May Lead to Defunct/Zombie Rsyslog Processes

Has your rsyslogd stopped logging? Do you have defunct rsyslogd processes? The problem may be corrupt spool files, and the fix may be as simple as this:

            sudo rm /var/spool/rsyslog/*
            sudo /etc/init.d/rsyslog restart
            

I’ve seen this problem occur at least five or six times after restarting EC2 instances, and although I’m still not sure what’s causing it in the first place, at least now I know the fix. I hope this saves someone out there a lot of trouble. This was not an easy one to figure out.