*BSD News Article 81497


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From: john@burdell (John Galbraith)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Running out of processes in FreeBSD 2.1.5
Followup-To: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Date: 25 Oct 1996 06:18:14 GMT
Organization: The University of Arizona
Lines: 12
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <JOHN.96Oct24231814@burdell>
NNTP-Posting-Host: burdell.ece.arizona.edu

I am having trouble with the process table filling up, it seems.  I
get messages like "cannot fork()", "vfork() failed", and stuff like
that after I have been running for a while.  I generally run X, but I
am the only user of the machine.  When I first started running into
this, I cranked "maxusers" up to 25 (which would seem like plenty of
entries to me, isn't that something like 25*16 = 400 processes?) but
it doesn't seem to have any effect.  My problem must be somewhere
else.  ps doesn't show any zombies or weird stuff filling up the
process table.  In fact, it only lists about 45 entries! Is this a
problem that has been encountered by anybody else?

John