topic Re: fork error message in Operating System - HP-UX

fork error message

Nyck_1 — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:49:09 GMT

One of my users is reporting the following error message when running his perl program:-

Unable to fork: Not enough space

I have looked through syslog.log and found no issues, there is loadsa available swap space. What else could be causing this issue?

No one else is reporting any problems with the server!

Re: fork error message

James R. Ferguson — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:58:03 GMT

Hi:

Failures in fork() for no memory are due to insufficient swap space or insufficient memory.

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: fork error message

Nyck_1 — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:04:39 GMT

This is what I currently have and it looks fine too me, would you agree:-

swapinfo -tam
Mb Mb Mb PCT START/ Mb
TYPE AVAIL USED FREE USED LIMIT RESERVE PRI NAME
dev 16384 0 16384 0% 0 - 1 /dev/vg00/lvol2
reserve - 15607 -15607
memory 65506 21940 43566 33%
total 81890 37547 44343 46% - 0 -

I have asked them to try again in case it was running out when they last tried

Re: fork error message

OldSchool — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:29:35 GMT

if the users program inadvertantly keeps fork'ing itself, due to coding error, then it should reproduce when they run it again

Re: fork error message

Dennis Handly — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:41:36 GMT

It appears this is a continuation of your other thread:
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1255158

>This is what I currently have and it looks fine too me, would you agree:

You need to run this during the perl script.

>OldSchool: if the user's program inadvertently keeps fork'ing itself

You can monitor this by using tusc:
tusc -fp -o tusc.out perl-script ...

Re: fork error message

Nyck_1 — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 20:34:35 GMT

Yeah I have been having one of those days. I will give the truss a go on Monday morning!

Re: fork error message

Srimalik — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 05:48:22 GMT

Have you done security settings using /etc/security, Not sure whether its available in HPUX.

See if you have set nprocs kernel parameter to a very small value.

See if the process is forking again and again. You will never want to run such a program on a production system. tusc can help you to cjheck this.

Re: fork error message

Nyck_1 — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 05:52:22 GMT

/etc/security/limits is only AIX i'm afraid.

I increased nprocs a while back, but the issue is now resolved and I believe that its was done to a user error. Thanks for all the excellent replys.

Re: fork error message

Srimalik — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 06:00:27 GMT

> /etc/security/limits is only AIX i'm afraid.

Its available on linux also.

Just checked HP, there seems to be no such thing.

Re: fork error message

Nyck_1 — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 06:02:10 GMT

Linux also, thats good!

That file is so nice as u set all to -1 and then its unlimited.