fork failing for no obvious reason?

Tim Smith (tzs@tzs.net)
Fri, 16 Apr 1999 15:17:06 -0700 (PDT)


Hi;

I've got 2.2.4 SMP with two CPUs running a fairly busy web server, and I'm
running into an odd problem. When the total number of processes on the
system gets above around 170, non-root can no longer fork. Errno is set to
EAGAIN. The per-user process limit is 256, so obviously no one is near that
limit.

>From root, I can fork to my heart's content--I have no trouble starting
up 40 or 50 root shells (that's not a limit--I get tired of typing
"sh<RETURN>" after that many).

I've got half a gig of RAM, with about 400 meg free if buffers are
subtracted out, so I don't seem to be running out of memory.

Anyone have any suggestions as to what resource I need more of?

--Tim Smith

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/