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From: Mikhail Teterin <mi@aldan.algebra.com>
Message-Id: <199804191458.KAA02223@rtfm.ziplink.net>
Subject: Cannot fork
To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Date: Sun, 19 Apr 1998 10:58:34 -0400 (EDT)
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Hello!

Every once in a while I get this message which will not go away
until I stop a few processes. It usually shows up when I run make,
which spawns processes left and right (like when making ports).
But I do not run that many:

    mi@xxx:ports/editors/vim5 (155) ps -ax | wc -l
         125

And there is plenty of swap:

    mi@xxx:ports/editors/vim5 (156) pstat -s
    Device      1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Type
    /dev/sd1s1b     65536    23068    42404    35%    Interleaved
    /dev/sd0s1b     65536    22784    42688    35%    Interleaved
    /dev/sd2s1b     65536    22564    42908    34%    Interleaved
    Total          196416    68416   128000    35%

Kernel limits known to me are also quite far from being close:

    mi@xxx:ports/editors/vim5 (157) sysctl -a | grep proc
    kern.maxproc: 2068
    kern.maxfilesperproc: 4136
    kern.maxprocperuid: 2067

Not too many files open:

    mi@xxx:ports/editors/vim5 (162) su -K
    mi@xxx:ports/editors/vim5 (149) lsof | wc -l
        1601

And my user-ID belongs to the root's login class, so there should
be no artificial limitations. There is nothing interesting in the
log either. Machine has 128Mb of RAM.

This is happening on 2.2.6-STABLE and on -CURRENT (on a smaller
machine), so I doubt this is a bug. Rather a feature I do not
understand...

Thanks for clues!

	-mi

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