cannot fork process

[Bakos György]

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

[Michael Tully]

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.

[Kent Ostby]

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

[Sanjay Kumar Suri]

Look at the link as well.

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

sks

[Katsu39]

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

[Jeroen Peereboom]

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

[Trond Haugen]

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

[Bakos György]

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 ....)

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

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

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

Bakos,

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

Robert-Jan

[Bakos György]

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

[Bakos György]

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

[Marvin Strong · Accepted solution]

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.

[Bakos György]

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