info-vax@ucbvax.ARPA (06/11/85)
From: tom@maryland The phone line and modem availability, and security issues mentioned by Gail Rubin and Charlie Abzug are good reasons for having automatic logout. I expand here on one facet of the problem. On UNIX systems particularly, inactive users tend to have a number of processes. Each process holds a slot in the fixed-size process table, potentially preventing active users from forking new processes. More seriously, each process holds a potentailly large part of the system's swap disk (this is alleviated somewhat by re-entrant code for popular processes). This also can prevent forking new processes. Since everything (well, almost everything) you do in UNIX is done by forking off a new process to do it, the system becomes unusable (even though it may have many spare `crunchons'). Tom Melton tom@maryland