Not much response on this one I'm afraid. First, my question:
I'm getting occasional (but not infrequent) errors from Emacs under
Solaris 2.1. The error message is "vfork: not enough processes" or
words to that effect. At first I thought this was an MH problem (it
first started to happen when mailing with mh-e), but I then discovered
the same thing happens with other shell commands from Emacs.
I bumped up the kernel MAXUSERS config parameter in hopes of avoiding
the problem, but it made essentially no difference. I'm not running
anything especially wierd on the machine (a SPARC Classic), just a
couple of xterms, a clock, xbiff and so forth.
This is Emacs 18.59, compiled with gcc 2.3.3 under Solaris 2.1 (my old
SunOS 4.1.2 Emacs dumps core under "binary compatibility mode").
I got two responses, as follows:
From: "Prof. J.H. Davenport" <J.H.Davenport@maths.bath.ac.uk>
Your problem might be the per-user limit on processes,
not the system total number of processes (which is what
MAXUSERS will affect). Not having Solaris 2.1 yet,
and the second one:
From: strombrg@hydra.acs.uci.edu
Start up some dead-weight process, that you can later kill with no
grief. When you get the "out of processes" problem, kill that process
and quickly do a ps to see what's using up the process slots.
Alternatively, and perhaps preferrably, start up "top" in an xterm,
and wait for the right time to look it over...
Dan Stromberg - OAC/DCS strombrg@uci.edu
However I checked by kernel parameters and found the following:
266 entries in proc table (NPROC)
261 processes per user id (MAXUP)
so I'm pretty sure I'm not running out of user procs. Also, whenever
the bug manifests itself I can still execute shell commands in another
xterm window with no trouble.
So the mystery remains ...
Patrick O'Callaghan Internet: poc@usb.ve
Departamento de Computacion NICNAME: PO22
Universidad Simon Bolivar Tel: +058 (2) 906 3320, 906 3947
Apartado de Correos 89000 FAX: +058 (2) 93 71 28
Caracas, Venezuela "There is no Net but the Internet"
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