From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Sep 30 13:19:48 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id NAA19426 for questions-outgoing; Tue, 30 Sep 1997 13:19:48 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail.cre8tivegroup.com (abt6.bitwise.net [204.97.222.226]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id NAA19419 for ; Tue, 30 Sep 1997 13:19:43 -0700 (PDT) Received: from [204.255.227.60] by mail.cre8tivegroup.com (SMTPD32-3.04) id AF9A5DA001E8; Tue, 30 Sep 1997 16:22:50 -0400 Message-ID: X-Mailer: XFMail 1.0 [p0] on FreeBSD Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 16:13:46 -0400 (EDT) Organization: The Creative Group From: Patrick Gardella To: Doug White Subject: Re: Faxmail error? HELP!!! Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG, flexfax@celestial.com Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On 30-Sep-97 Doug White wrote: >On Tue, 30 Sep 1997, Patrick Gardella wrote: > >> I am running Hylafax 4.0pl1 on FreeBSD 2.2.1 on a Pentium 200 with 128 Megs >> RAM. Sendmail is 8.8.5. Modems are seven Multitech Multimodems 2834ZDX on a Cy >> clades8Yo multiport serial card. I'm sending this to both the HylaFAX and >> FreeBSD lists to get input from both parties. > >OK, scratch login.conf. > >> All of them had the error code 2 that says "Cannot fork" >> >> I've included some stats on the system to provide some clues to what >> might be happening. > >You're running out of processes per child. > >Try rebuilding your kernel with the following options: > >options CHILD_MAX=128 >options OPEN_MAX=128 > >You might try just rebooting too. I'd have to see a ps -ax to get a sense >of what's going on. hylafax may be leaking memory or file descriptors. I've done this and will see what happens (kernel and reboot). It may take a while to have this problem come up again, since this did not happen until after almost 1 1/2 months of continuous running without a reboot. >> The kernel is compiled with "maxusers" as 40 giving me 656 processes. > >That is somewhat loose; the above variables control this much more >directly. > >Hm, there was one zombie process. You might want to keep track of those >and make sure they don't get too numerous. A zombie process is one that's >waiting for it's parent to recognize that it's dead. If big apps (like >faxmail or anything fax related) is getting stuck, it doesn't release it's >resources until it's postiviely dead. They're generally caused by >programing errors related to not understanding the BSD process model. The zombie processes have diappeared, by the time I went in to copy down the ps -ax data. I did see that they were (hfaxd) and (faxq), before when I first did ps -ax. I'll keep everyone up to date. Thanks Doug. Patrick P.S. Doug, is maxusers ok at 40? Or is there a better value?