Fork Failed - errno: 11 Resource temporarily unavailable"

[Jorge Tovar_2]

Why this error is produced?
I have a server Model 9000/800/L2000-5X, HPUX v11.11, with Sybase 11.9.0.2 and when I run many process I get this error.

The size of the swap (memory virtual) is 4GB.
Can Somebody help me?

Thanks.

[David_246]

/usr/sbin/swapinfo

Regs David

[Dietmar Konermann]

EAGAIN... you clearly hit nproc or maxuprc.

[Frank Slootweg]

Either nproc or maxuprc kernel parameters are too small or you just have too many processes (zombies?)

You can check the process table ("proc-sz" column) "sar -v 10 10".

Also look for process-related error in your syslog.log file.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi,

EAGAIN 11 /* No more processes

This means you are hitting your maxuprc limit most probably.

Do a ps -ef|grep your_user|wc -l

If it is near your "maxuprc", then you may want to bump it up. Maxuprc is dynamic on 11i, so you can increase it on the fly.

If not, then it could be your nproc. Do sar -v 2 20 and observe the proc-sz and ov columns.

-Sri

[Frank Slootweg]

As to how to find this out yourself:

$ grep 11 /usr/include/sys/errno.h
#define EAGAIN 11 /* No more processes */

and then lookup the error mnemonic name, i.e. EAGAIN in this case, in the manual page of the system call, i.e. fork(2) in this case.

If no system call is mentioned, you can lookup the generic meaning in the errno(2) manual page.

[Bill Hassell]

I always forget the path to errno.h so I wrote a script to search for the errno value (number or text) and also grab the description from the man page. It's attached here.