topic Re: fork failed - too many proccesses in Operating System - HP-UX

fork failed - too many proccesses

Glenn Mitchell_4 — Wed, 25 Apr 2001 11:05:25 GMT

I'm getting the fllowing msg on an HP 9000 (E35) running HPUX 10.20:

Don't have the exact output, but something like this:
fork failed, too manyy proccesses

I looked at the tunable parameters in the kernel file, but didn't see anything out of the ordinary. I eventually rebooted the system to get around the problem. This occurred about a month ago on the same system, so I'm thinking it will keep coming back t haunt me until I figure out what's wrong.

Thanks in advance!

Re: fork failed - too many proccesses

David_546 — Wed, 25 Apr 2001 11:11:59 GMT

Hi,

Did you try increasing the values of "nproc" (max system proc) and "maxuprc" (max user procc)?.

Compare this value with the ouput of "ps -ef | wc -l". This will count the total number of process running on the system.

Another way to see how many process are running is using Q4?

Do you have enough memory?.

Hope this help!

David.

Re: fork failed - too many proccesses

James R. Ferguson — Wed, 25 Apr 2001 11:13:29 GMT

Hi Glenn:

See other responses in your first post:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x2e9e0cb17a32d5118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

...JRF...

Re: fork failed - too many proccesses

nancy rippey — Wed, 25 Apr 2001 11:13:31 GMT

What is 'nproc' set at. Nproc is the total number of processes that can exist simultaneously on the system. It probably needs to be increased.

Re: fork failed - too many proccesses

Carlos Fernandez Riera — Wed, 25 Apr 2001 13:37:58 GMT

run sar -v and check running proc / max proc.

If it was happen a month ago maybe a bug proccess was caused it... imagine a process that call itsef until it fail...

Re: fork failed - too many proccesses

Shannon Petry — Wed, 25 Apr 2001 22:17:45 GMT

As others said, raise nproc in the kernel!

Of note though is to dump a process table to see what is abnormal. I E I had a system magically freak out with the lp command, and would constantly get 100 or so processes hung for lp. So the nproc was only the symptom of a larger problem.

Never treat the symptom, but rather treat the problem!

Regards,
Shannon

Re: fork failed - too many proccesses

Luis Miguel Parra Chica — Thu, 26 Apr 2001 07:00:55 GMT

Hi guys,

All that is good, but when I got the same problem some months ago; the question was to "chmod 777 /tmp" on the host. Why don't you check this???

Good luck