Server Hung--/etc/profile[31]: The fork function failed. Too many processes already exist

[Sri123]

Hi,

We had to reset a HP-UX 11.11 server which was hung and when we checked the console, we found the below messages:


Last unsuccessful login for root: Wed Mar 23 12:15:12 uae-4 2011
Please wait...checking for disk quotas
could not execute quota command
/etc/profile[31]: The fork function failed. Too many processes already exist.
/etc/profile[48]: The fork function failed. Too many processes already exist.
/etc/profile[72]: The fork function failed. Too many processes already exist.
/etc/profile[131]: The fork function failed. Too many processes already exist.
/etc/profile[132]: test: Specify a parameter with this command.
.profile[20]: The fork function failed. Too many processes already exist.
WARNING: YOU ARE SUPERUSER !!
.profile[56]: The fork function failed. Too many processes already exist.
.profile[84]: The fork function failed. Too many processes already exist.


When i checked in with the similar error in other ITRC forums, it stated the problem is with the nproc and maxusers. But below is the values respectively in the server:

maxusers 2000 - 2000
nproc 20096 - (4096+8*MAXUSERS)

Kindly let me know in resolving this problem.


Thanks & Regards
Sridhar

[Dennis Handly]

What is the actual value of nproc? You would think you wouldn't have a subtraction based on MAXUSERS.

What does "ps -ef | wc -l" show for an estimate of the number of processes.

>It stated the problem is with the nproc and maxusers.

It seems like it. Or maxuprc?

[Bob_Vance]

Maybe some rogue process is in a loop spawning children.
Or a badly modified script or profile is doing same.


@ Dennis
BTW, I think that his output was from kmtune in format:

parm value - formula

and
8*2000 + 4096 = 20096
.

bv