proc table full

[Carol Garrett]

Hi,

Im getting this message from dmesg;
proc: table is full

But if I do a sar -v 1 1 it says proc-sz is only 214/664. What is happening ?

[Stefan Farrelly]

Check what time these messages ocurred to see if theyre recent;

grep full /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log

Now you get a date+timestamp on them. If theyre recent then at the time stated your proc table was full, ie it went over your 664 limit. Now you need to find out why. What jobs are running at that time ? its usually an overnight backup or batch job which causes it. If you need to then run a job at regular intervals doing a sar -v 1 1 command and a ps -elf so list all processes running so if it happens again you can check thru this output to see what all the extra processes were that were running.
If you have Measureware installed and PerfView you could backtrack thru their performance logs and do a drill down by process to see what the processes were that were running.

[Ken Scharpell · Accepted solution]

You proc table did fill up at some point.
To fix it increase nproc and rebuild the kernel and reboot.

To see when it last produced this error do an ll /var/adm/msgbuf, the date+timestamp on this file gives you the last time an entry about the proc table being full was added, ie. when your proc table was full.