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From: Mark Hittinger <bugs@ns1.win.net>
Message-Id: <199507111648.MAA03821@ns1.win.net>
Subject: re: proc table is full
To: questions@freebsd.org
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 1995 12:48:47 -0400 (EDT)
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> From: splyaski@cmp.com (Plyaskin Sergey)
> fluke /kernel:  proc: table is full
> fluke inetd[73]: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable.
> About my system:
> FreeBSD 2.0-950412 on the Everex 486DX33 with 16 MB RAM.  I have the 
> following packages installed:
> gated
> Pine-3.91/Pico
> ELM 2.4
> Majordomo-1.93
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> CERN httpd 3.0
> There's no X stuff.  Since April, I have not had any problems.  By today, 
> the system was up for 9 days.
> Any info/hints will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Probably the mailing list is creating tons of processes.  I had to modify
our majordomo to cause sendmail to just queue the mail instead of attempting
to deliver it right away.  There is a sendmail switch you can put in the
aliases file entry "-odq".

If there is a lot of this activity, and a lot of web stuff you may want to
do the following things to your system:

1.  Make sure you have enough swap space configured.  I use 128mb on my
    main server.  

2.  In your kernel config file:

maxusers 256

options		"CHILD_MAX=128"
options		"OPEN_MAX=128"
options		"NMBCLUSTERS=512"

Good luck!

Mark Hittinger
bugs@win.net