[ale] bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

[Joe Steele]

Keep an eye on the number of processes you have running.  Something 
may be forking off too many.  I think there is an overall limit of 
about 512 total.  The limit per normal user is about half that.  

Also, I think it might (?) be possible for a process (running as 
root) to reach this limit by having a large quantity of zombie 
children which have exited but which have not been released via 
wait().

How to fix it when it happens?  Forking new processes will require 
you to kill old ones first.  Exiting from programs and shells might 
help (or it might not, if some other process is forking new children 
as quickly as you make resources available for them).  Using bash's 
built-in "kill" command might help if you know some PID's to kill.  
Using bash's "exec" command might also help (no fork necessary), but 
you will lose your shell in the effort, meaning you might only get 
one shot at fixing the problem.

--Joe

-----Original Message-----
From:	Ken Nagorski [SMTP:kenn at pcintelligent.com]
Sent:	Wednesday, February 21, 2001 3:39 AM
To:	ale at ale.org
Subject:	[ale] bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

Hi there,

	On occassion we get this from a server and the only way to fix it
is to power cycle it. Does anyone have any idea what causes this and how
to fix it? Or how to get the thing to reboot somehow?

Thanks
Ken

-- 
I've got all the money I'll ever need if I die by 4 o'clock.
                -- Henny Youngman


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