vfork: resource temporarily unavailable
 

Hello,
I've been getting this error off and on at random intervals for almost the entire time I've been using Linux (~2 years). It occurs almost without fail when I launch a Java app, like Azureus, for example. I've read that it is most likely due to a filled process table but I can't see how this could be since Linux is used on servers. I'd imagine the number of processes allowed to run simultaneously to be nearly unlimited.


Has anyone else experienced this problem? I'd like to finally diagnose it.
Thanks

Maybe start by posting kernel version, "sysctl -a | egrep "^(kernel|vm)\."" and your users "ulimit -a".

Linux 2.6.19 #12 Mon Dec 11 23:44:25 EST 2006 i686 GNU/Linux

ulimit -a:
core file size (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size (kbytes, -d) unlimited
max nice (-e) 0
file size (blocks, -f) unlimited
pending signals (-i) unlimited
max locked memory (kbytes, -l) unlimited
max memory size (kbytes, -m) unlimited
open files (-n) 1024
pipe size (512 bytes, -p) 8
POSIX message queues (bytes, -q) unlimited
max rt priority (-r) 0
stack size (kbytes, -s) 8192
cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes (-u) 100
virtual memory (kbytes, -v) unlimited
file locks (-x) unlimited


I usually have about 140-70 processes running when this happens, although it's possible I could have less and I'd get the same error. I'm guessing 'max user processes' is what I should be looking at.

This line gives it away right here:

Check out /etc/security/limits.conf

Ah, thanks so much. In limits.conf, the hard setting was 150 so I changed that to 250. Processes ramped up to 173, which seems promising. However, with Azureus, I still get the vfork error message but it seems to be complaining solely about lack of memory even though I'm only using 70% of total. I never use Azureus but this same thing has happened with other Java apps.

This error has been rearing its ugly head again recently. It does from time to time. This time I'm trying to run an application with Wine, which always seems to cause problems. I added a max user processes line to limits.conf as suggested in this thread. That didn't seem to do any good. I've also explicitly told ulimit to accept new processes up to 250 and, yet, the error keeps coming.

'ps -ef|wc -l' says I currently have 130 processes running... well below the 250 I've specified.