fork failed - too many proccesses

[Glenn Mitchell_4]

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!

[David_546]

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.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Glenn:

See other responses in your first post:

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

...JRF...

[nancy rippey]

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.

[Carlos Fernandez Riera]

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...

[Shannon Petry]

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

[Luis Miguel Parra Chica]

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