I think this was the problem [1] was targeting [1] http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2016/01/dumb-init-an-init-fo...

One of many.

Which is why u think might as well get systemd working on docker...

I see, so it looks like if your process spawns other processes and doesn't reap them when they die, you end up in trouble with zombie processes in docker.