SUMMARY: Cannot create slave child: Not enough space (backup)

Hi admins ,

Thanks to all who responded so quickly to my question ,

I got several responses to the problem which all pointed out to a lack of
swap space on /tmp .
I included some of  the answers I received :

1 . from Stuart Whitby : . 

This looks like a memory issue, so the reboot would 
clear it (unless it's an issue with the chip itself).
You get the error on three filesystems because the 
backup software attempts to launch a slave process to
back up each filesystem.  My guess is that some process
was leaking memory, and that's why you managed to run 
fsck for a while, after which point it failed.

2.  from Eguan Pankratz : 

what where the contents of /tmp (df -k)?

[eyal edri]
the df -lk printout : 
dragon [eedri:~] df -lk
Filesystem            kbytes    used   avail capacity  Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s0     384847  313111   33256    91%    /
/proc                      0       0       0     0%    /proc
fd                         0       0       0     0%    /dev/fd
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s7     546478  490306    1532   100%    /home3
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s6    1924883 1838518   67117    97%    /home4
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s7    2067617  432699 1614242    22%    /home5
swap                   38712       8   38704     1%    /tmp

the available memory space (swap+physical memory) is used jointly as memory
and as the /tmp filesystem,
so an approaching overflow of /tmp and/or swap can manifest itself in space
allocation problems. It would explain
the correct state after reboot since the previous contents of /tmp would be
automatically deleted.
e.pankratz

more admins who helped , 10x : 

Flecher Joe. 
Bertrand Hutin . 
Moti Levy. 

Eyal Edri wrote:
> 
> Hi Admins ,
> 
> I have encuntered two errors that are probably connected somehow :
> . after a daily backup on an axil 245 system runing Sol 2.5.1 I got this
> message :
>    (1) Cannot create slave child: Not enough space
>     this error showed on all 3 home filesystems on the station on the
backup
> log .
>     i've tried to fo fsck to all 3 fs , including unmouting them and
runing
> fsck to the raw device, after a successfull fsck to the 1st fs the lst two
> gave me this msg :
>    (2) cannot alloc 2356789  bytes for aclinop
>    and quit out of fsck .
> 
> after looking in /var/adm/messages & sunmannagers archive and found
nothing
> , I've rebooted the station and the problem seemed to be solved.
> Nevertheless , It is important to me to understand the meanning of those
> errors since I am backing up crucial data each day .
> 
> thank you ,
> 
> Will summerize .
> 
> Best Regards,
> 
> Eyal Edri
> Unix System Administrator
> Avaya Communications
> 
> Email  : eedri@lannet.com
> Phone & Fax : 972-3-6458487
> 
> 
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