SUMMARY: vfork failed

From: Waqar Hafiz (whafiz@london.micrognosis.com)
Date: Tue Nov 19 1996 - 09:10:41 CST


Original question :
>
> What does the error message 'vfork failed' mean?
> How to resolve the problem?
>

Answer :

'vfork failed' means that a process could not be started due to
any of the following reasons:

        Max no of processes configured in the kernel exceeded

        Out of virtual memory which is caused by being out of
        swap space

In my case, it was the 1st reason. A rogue shell script was
spawning a lot of child processes.

Waqar Hafiz
email : whafiz@london.micrognosis.com

My thanks to the following for their valuable input :

Colin McNeill <colin@gtl.com>
Weldon S Godfrey 3 <weldon@excelsus.com>
mrs@cadem.mc.xerox.com ("Michael Salehi x22725")
mcgonigl@bose.com
"Trevor Paquette" <TrevorPaquette@aec.ca>
hxktb0@svho1nfs_1.supervalu.com (Kris Briscoe)
fpardo@tisny.com (Frank Pardo)
irana@hrwallingford.co.uk
seanm@sybase.com (Sean McInerney)
Rich Kulawiec <rsk@itw.com>
Alex Finkel <afinkel@pfn.com>
raju@hoho.ecologic.net
Kevin.Sheehan@uniq.com.au
stern@sunrise.East.Sun.COM (Hal Stern - Distinguished Systems Engineer)
Marina.Daniels@ccd.tas.gov.au
Kirk Anderson <kma@hrb.com>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:11:16 CDT