[comp.unix.microport] Too many processes?

foobar@tegan.UUCP (John Fruetel) (06/05/88)

I've been having a problem with tegan here for about a week, and it's
starting to really baffle me.

I get my news feed (via PC Pursuit) from a box in San Jose, CA.  This has
worked fine for quite some time, although PC pursuit is usually pretty busy
in San Jose.  Because PC Pursuit is generally pretty busy, I have tegan
call it's buddy zorch every ten minutes from 11:00 PM through 4:00 AM.
Placing this many calls generally means that I can get in 4 or 5 times a night.

But something weird happened about a week ago.  I installed a second hard drive
in tegan for /usr/spool.  The installation and configuration was no problem,
but tegan just isn't the same.  While receiving news, my system says that it
runs out of processes!  When I do a ps -ea (if I can), there always seems
to be a moderate number of tasks (like 10).  The problem seems to occur
while uncompressing one batch while receiving another.

What's going on?  Before I had the second drive, everything worked just great!

-- 
John Fruetel               {uunet, pyramid, ames}!zorch!tegan!foobar
In my spare bedroom        ihnp4!lll-crg!csustan!koko!tegan!foobar
here in Turlock            (209) 632-8027  (voice)

hack@bellboy.UUCP (Greg Hackney) (06/07/88)

In article <121@tegan.UUCP> foobar@tegan.UUCP (John Fruetel) writes:

>While receiving news, my system says that it
>runs out of processes!

What is the exact error message?

You should be able to see the number of processes your
system is configured with in the file /usr/include/sys/kdef.h

"MAXUP" is the max number of processes per user.
"NPROC" is the max number of processes total.

--
Greg

foobar@tegan.UUCP (John Fruetel) (06/09/88)

From article <1086@bellboy.UUCP>, by hack@bellboy.UUCP (Greg Hackney):
> You should be able to see the number of processes your
> system is configured with in the file /usr/include/sys/kdef.h
> 
> "MAXUP" is the max number of processes per user.
> "NPROC" is the max number of processes total.

Hmm.... That file ain't on my system.  I'm running uport V/AT.  

What usually happens (since I added my second disk drive) is that cron
sends me nasty letters when it wants to run some simple litte thing saying
that fork failed -- too may processes.

What also happens quite a bit is when I check my computer out in the morning,
(I generally leave root signed on all the time) I'll type "ls" or some other 
simple little command and it'll say "no more processes."  What seems to be
happening (according to the logs) is that uuxqt and rnews get "stuck" 
because they can't find open process slots.  If I sign off of root,
that opens up one slot and uuxqt/rnews goes about it's merry way uncompressing
news.  Like I said, all this began happening when I installed my second
drive.  What's going on?

Incidentally, if it's meaningful, I have an AT clone with only 1 meg (I'd like
more, but have you priced memory recently?!?) one 40 meg miniscribe and a 20
meg seagate.
-- 
John Fruetel               {uunet, pyramid, ames}!zorch!tegan!foobar
In my spare bedroom        ihnp4!lll-crg!csustan!koko!tegan!foobar
here in Turlock            (209) 632-8027  (voice)