Wat's mean HP-UX fork message?

[Abdel Guelmamene]

Hi,

I have an Hp-UX system, same times i have this message error : Fork

Wat can i do?
Wat is the meanning of this message?

Regards

[T G Manikandan]

Fork error is that the system is unable to create a new process.
This is probably due to the limit reached on the kernel.

check the maxuprc and nproc kernel parameters.

maxuprc-->max. processes for a user
nproc-->max no. processes for the entire system.

Just do a
kmtune -l |more

Find out the values for maxuprc and nproc.

It this error is from the end-user then you need to definitely check maxuprc
DO a
$ps -ef|grep |wc -l
to find the number of processes run by the user.
If they match to maxuprc then you should try increasing it.

After increasing those values using SAM you can rebuild the kernel and reboot for the changes to take effect

REvert

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

This isn't the complete error message. It probably says something like: Cannot fork: no memory or no process table entries or no file table entries. fork is a Unix term that means a process is started. You can replace the term 'fork' with run program. There are other details about fork but they are not important here. The reason for the error message is likely:

1. Out of swap space (no memory and no swap space)

2. Out of process table entries (must increase kernel parameter: nproc)

3. Out of file table entries (must increase kernel parameter: nfile)

Be sure to look in /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log to see additional information about Unix error messages.

[Oleg Zieaev_1]

Hello.

May I suggest you run sar -v 1 and check proc-sz.
Do you receive this error when trying to start process by certain user or any user? If only one user has this - you might consider increasing maxuprc kernel parameter.
Also - check your swap utilization. You might have run out of swap space.
Just a note, fork may give you an error in many cases, so more details about the message (best is to copy and paste the exact complete message) will help to give you precise remedy for you problem.

Hope this helps,
0leg

[Michael Tully]

Please post the entire line from either your /var/adm/syslog/syslog file or from 'dmesg'. The 'dmesg' output could possibly be old.

[T. M. Louah]

As stated above sar -v 2 2 should give you an idea of kernel parms usage:
proc-sz (nproc), inod-sz (ninod) and file-sz (nfile) with Value1/Value2 format:
Value1: current kernel consumption
Value2: The max Kernel parms value
pay attention to proc-sz & file-sz if they are maxed out you can then use SAM to increase maxusers as it will impact nproc & nfile.
# grep -i maxuser /stand/build/tune.h

Note: It is a standard on this forum to put MODEL & HPUX release & the complete error msg as appropriate.

Cheers
T??