[ILUG] Return of the 'Unable to fork' monster

[Paul Jakma]

On Thu, 16 Mar 2000, Tony Bolger wrote:

> One of my rather overspeced linux servers had an attack of the old
> 'Unable to fork' problem on Sunday. Normally, this would be annoying
> enough, but on a server with 400MB of free RAM, its just not on. This
> machine is a 2.2.12 box, and needed a reboot to fix. Free command gives:

did the log say why it was unable to fork? i doubt it's due to swap/ram.
more likely you've hit a resource limit like file descriptors or number
of processes. both of which can be tweaked via /proc/sys/kernel.

see src/linux/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt or something
similar. 

What kind of use does your box get? 

-paul jakma.