topic Re: cannot fork process in Operating System - HP-UX

cannot fork process

Bakos György — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 01:39:55 GMT

Hi
I have some issues on a B2000 wit HP-UX 10.20
If I want to run a test it sends a message on the console:
cannot fork process

i self cannot see any messages in the log files

Re: cannot fork process

Michael Tully — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 01:46:42 GMT

SOunds like your kernel is out of nprocs or maxuprc or even both.

You'll need to increase these amounts, generate a new kernel and reboot your system.

Re: cannot fork process

Kent Ostby — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 01:53:09 GMT

cannot fork processes usually indicates that you are out of nproc or out of swap space depending on the message that goes with it in syslog.log.

reboot will clean things up, but sometimes you can squeeze in a ps -ef command and see if there is a particular process that is going crazy.

Try to do a ps -ef > /tmp/processes before you have to do a reboot so that even if you have to reboot, you have a listing of the processes that are taking up slots on the system.

Best regards,

Kent M. Ostby

Re: cannot fork process

Sanjay Kumar Suri — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 01:53:59 GMT

Look at the link as well.

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=27115

sks

Re: cannot fork process

Katsu39 — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 01:54:54 GMT

Hello,
Which test would you like to do?
If you use the CDE or anyother X-windos,plase try to do "xstm".

http://docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/otsearch/getfile?id=/hpux/onlinedocs/diag/logtool/lgt_startx.htm&searchterms=xstm&queryid=20040310-234525

or you can fine some manual of diagnostics on "http://docs.hp.com"

Regards

Re: cannot fork process

Jeroen Peereboom — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 02:05:54 GMT

L.S.

A simple cause of this message is that a program (your program) is spawning too many processes, for example by calling itself.

When you see the message 'cannot fork', try to do a ps -ef to see the processes. Problem is that ps -ef may fail too, for the same reason.

If you are sure there is nothing wrong with the programs you are running, it's time to increase kernel parameters, as stated by the others.
JP

Re: cannot fork process

Trond Haugen — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 03:11:06 GMT

Your reference to te error message is not precise enough. It could be ether the system hiffing nproc which you can check with 'ps -e | wc -l' and compair to nproc.
Or you could be running out of swap which you can check with 'swapinfo -tm'.

Regards,
Trond

Re: cannot fork process

Bakos György — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 04:13:31 GMT

Hi

It says again the he can't fork more process.
I maked a ps and At the beginn I see some vx_inactive_thread

I have attached ps -ef>file , what is the root cause, can somebody help?
I tryed to kill this threads, but I can't
(kill -9 51 ....)

Re: cannot fork process

Michael Schulte zur Sur — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 04:20:24 GMT

Hi,

you have quite a few defunct processes. I would reboot the machine and then check the resources as the others said. What is this application you are running?

greetings,

Michael

Re: cannot fork process

Robert-Jan Goossens — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 04:23:36 GMT

Bakos,

Are you running 10.20 without jvs filesystems, if so remove vxbase driver from your kernel and reboot the server.

Robert-Jan

Re: cannot fork process

Bakos György — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 04:30:10 GMT

I have checked the nproc value It is at the moment 1044 so, the problem that it can't fork comes from something other.
swapinfo: enough amount of memory(70%)

why should I disable vxbase, how can I see that nothing uses this vxbase

but I see that in mnttab we use vxfs

Re: cannot fork process

Bakos György — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 04:43:13 GMT

I can see only some trouble with top, that this dexline processes are zombies for some seconds, so there is 50zombies, bit after there is no zombies...
The IDLE is 90%, the machine isn't overloaded, there is enough memory...
There isn't any logs about this trouble

Re: cannot fork process

Marvin Strong — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 12:15:50 GMT

it could be maxuprc

find out what user has the most running processes and

ps -ef | grep user | wc -l

compare that number with maxuprc parameter.

Re: cannot fork process

Bakos György — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 01:44:32 GMT

Thanks. It was maxuprc!!!!!!!
Thanks again