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Date: Mon, 3 Nov 1997 19:27:17 -0700 (MST)
From: Charles Mott <cmott@srv.net>
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To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Maximum number of forked processes
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On Tue, 4 Nov 1997, Greg Lehey wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 03, 1997 at 04:16:36PM -0700, Charles Mott wrote:
> > How does one control the maximum number of forked processes from within
> > the parent process?
> 
> I suppose the answer is  "manually".  setrlimit(2) allows you to limit
> the  number of processes (=forks)    per user, but   I  don't know  of
> anything that would limit the number of children of a process.
> 
> > Since this is an elementary question but regards programming, I was
> > uncertain whether to send it to -questions or -hackers.
> 
> In fact, I'd think that this is worthy of -hackers, so I'm following
> up there.
> 
> Greg

Tentatively, I am thinking of incrementing a counter when a process is
forked and decrementing it when a SIGCLD is received.  However, I don't
know what standard procedure is in this matter.

Charles Mott