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From: Jerry.Kendall@vmicls.com (Jerry Kendall)
Organization: VMI Communications and Learning Systems
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Date: Mon, 11 Dec 1995 09:12:43 +0500
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To: joe@ns.via.net, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: unable to fork????
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> 
> 
> I have a 100MHZ pentium that I use as a web and FTP server. Recently
> we've been seeing Apache complaining about "can't spawn process". After
> making it print out errno from the failing fork(), we're getting EAGAIN.
> 
> I make a kernel with maxusers == 50 thinking that this would solve my problem.
> but it didn't.
> 
> Normally the system runs with 65-70 processes. When it gets to 99 or 100 it 
> refuses to fork any more.
> 
> Where is this limit set? How can I increase it? What other resources can I 
> tweak for a heavily loaded machine?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
>   Joe
> 

Joe, I had a similar problem.

Try adding these lines to you kernel config file:

maxusers    64
options     "CHILD_MAX=256"
options     "OPEN_MAX=256"

By doing this I was able to open more than 20 or so xterms....
Maybe this will help you.