fork: resource is temporary unavailable

[Andreas D. Skjervold]

Hi

Have a L-2000 with 11i installed, with 2GB RAM.
and keep getting:
bash: fork: resource is temporary unavailable

But can't figure out which resource?

[Ruediger Noack]

Hi Andreas,

Don't know this error message exactly.
Have you checked the syslog.log file an your nproc parameter? You can get the nproc peek simple with sar -v (sa1 script via cron).

Ruediger

[Andreas D. Skjervold]

Hi

Have no entrie in syslog, and have checked nproc (and increased it, to be sure) but the error remains.

Have began checking if this could be shell spesific.

Could this error occur if ulimit values are too low, and
how do I set ulimit values in a users / all users shell (bash)

Andreas

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

'nproc' specifies the global (system-wide) number of processes that can run simultaneously. Exceeding this value can lead to fork errors. On a per-user basis, the kernel parameter 'maxuprc' also imposes a limit which if exceeded leads to fork errors too. 'maxuprc' defaults to 50 and specifies the maximum number of simultaneous user processes that any given user can be running.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Bill Hassell]

bash (like the POSIX shell) supports ulimit options. Use ulimit -a to see the current settings. To see how many processes a single user is running:

ps -u user-name | wc -l

If it is close to 50 then the user is probably hitting the maxuprc limit in the kernel. This is a fence to prevent runaway processes or scripts from using all the resources. If the user doesn't expect to run that many processes, these may orphan processes that were left behind when login sessions were improperly terminated (as in a PC crash or reboot).

[Krishna Prasad]

I have also seen fork messages when a process needs swap space and there is not enough swap space.

What does swapinfo -ta show?
How much memory is available on the box?