sh: The fork function failed. Too many processes already exist.

[Deepu Chakravarty]

Login to the server taking too long. No command working and giving the following error.
$ l -slt|pg

sh: The fork function failed. Too many processes already exist.
$

Besides shutdown the server what are the other way of doing away with the too manay processess ?

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

Your ultimate solution is going to require increasing the nprocs kernel parameter (or maybe maxusers and let the formulas increase other paramters accordingly). Use SAM to do this. If you can't log in at all, you may need to reboot in single user mode to make this change.


Pete

[T G Manikandan]

Increase maxuprc on the kernel.

When you increase nproc this should inturn increase this!

[Vijaya Kumar_3]

Also try to shutdown some other processes (other than system processes).

Check your current kernel parameters with sysdef or kmtune commands.

Use SAM to increase the kernel parameter:
nproc

Reboot

Thanks
Vijay

[john korterman]

Hi,
either the max number of processes has been reached, or (I think) it may be caused by reaching the max number of processes for one user. You can of course increase these values, but check alos that you do not have an application running amok, e.g. by blindly starting processes from crontab or the like.

regards,
John K.

[T G Manikandan]

Also check whether the user has a program which uses fork function to spawn processes.

#ps -ef|grep

check what processes he is running.

If the values are low on the kernel then you need to increase teh values

nproc---number of system wide process limit
maxuprc--user wide processes limit

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

Before increasing the possible number of processes, take a look at the processes running. Perhaps some malfunctioning program is creating lots or processes. Now the problem you have is that you can't start processes to look at this.

So try to stop some processes (if on your own desktop, kill things like xclock and xload to get some air. And if nothing else helps you could run processes with exec, but that would log you out the moment the process ends. Syntax would be 'exec '.

[John Carr_2]

Hi

we had a problem like this many years ago where an application was spawning more processes than the server could cope with. we increased parameters to run but this just delayed the inevitable. Check for any applications which may be generating lots of similar processes.

just a thought !

:-) John

[Jim Butler]

ps -e | awk '{print $4, $2, $1}' | sort

look over your processes -

if you have a bunch that you want to kill,

kill 'ps -e | grep procname | awk '{print $2}'

[doug hosking]

Jim, be careful with that command line. You don't want to try to kill 'ron' and actually kill 'cron' for example.