/etc/profile [5] cannot fork:too many processes

[Scott_20]

Good Day.

I get this error message from time to time and I would like to know the best kernel settings for my Superdome. it's running HPUX 11.i, with Oracle 8.1.7 on top of it.
kernel settings of interest are:
maxfile_lim=2024
maxuser=128
ntpy=60
nfile=128000
nproc=1380
maxuproc=1024
maxfiles=180
maxfile_lim=1024
shmmax=5,000,000,000

Any suggestions would be great. Didn't find any relevant info.
on the Oracle site.

Thanks,
Scott

[Santosh Nair_1]

Looks like nproc is set too low, the process table is filling up. You should also take a look at the nkthread kernel parameter.

I would probably at least double nproc.

-Santosh

[linuxfan]

Hi Scott,

You could be running into a problem with nproc and/or maxuprc

Run "sar -v 2 10" to see what is the usage/value of proc-sz (which indicates the nproc being used/total avail)

Is this happening only to the oracle user, it is very possible you are running into the limit of maxuprc (maximum processes per user)
do a
ps -ef |grep oracle |wc -l

you will see this error whenever the user tries to spawn more than 1024 processes(in your case maxuprc is 1024).

-HTH
Ramesh

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

As you are getting from /etc/profile this could be mostly the nproc parameter.

Do a ps -ef|wc -l and see the number you are getting there and match it against your nproc value. If they are almost equal then you are running short of nproc. If not, it could be your maxuprc.

sar -v also gives you nproc usage.

-Sri

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Scott,

These are the parameters on my Box N-Class/OPS/MC-SG
maxfile_lim=2048
maxuser=300
npty=60
nfile=10000
nproc=2052
maxuprc=((NPROC*9)/10)
maxfiles=2048
maxfile_lim=2048
shmmax=1024*1024*1024

you can also look for some other postings related to performance tuning on this forun and they might help you.

Hope this helps.

Thanks