If I've got a few Chrome tabs open and try to do anything in terminal I get this message:

bash: fork: retry: No child processes
bash: fork: retry: No child processes
bash: fork: retry: No child processes
bash: fork: retry: No child processes
bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable



top returns this:
3125 root 20 0 180m 21m 7380 S 8.3 0.1 87:17.63 Xorg
3932 caleb-us 20 0 1429m 398m 70m S 5.3 2.5 146:33.89 chrome
3677 caleb-us 20 0 1224m 188m 59m S 5.0 1.2 63:09.88 gnome-shell
20272 caleb-us 20 0 733m 84m 39m S 3.7 0.5 0:16.57 chrome
20378 root 20 0 370m 15m 10m S 2.0 0.1 0:00.32 gnome-terminal
19725 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.3 0.0 0:00.29 kworker/2:0
19927 caleb-us 20 0 378m 16m 11m S 0.3 0.1 0:01.93 gnome-terminal
20397 root 20 0 23308 1700 1192 R 0.3 0.0 0:00.02 top
1 root 20 0 10652 816 676 S 0.0 0.0 0:02.82 init

Any ideas on how to fix this? Thanks!


Edit: Solution I found was just switch to Chromium

Can you tell us what exactly you typed into the terminal to get the response you show above. That might help in diagnosing the problem. Are you saying that if you type the same command in the terminal without Chrome being open then the command works normally?
jdk

Any command results in the same message and when I close Chrome terminal starts working again.

We are talking about the web browser "Google Chrome", yes?
Are you saying that if you have Chrome open with only one tab then the terminal works normally but if you open a second tab then the terminal stops working? And which terminal are you using? gnome-terminal? konsole? something else?
jdk

In addition to answering jdkaye's questions - which I have wondered about myself, What are your general system parameters: CPU, RAM, OS version.

Assuming there are no alarms set of by your answers to the above, it is possible that you may have a failing memory problem which just happens to be triggered by the chrome instances, so it might help if you could run memtest for a few hours.

I'm using gnome-terminal, I can open root terminal and it works fine. The number of tabs is inconsistent, it's usually around 4 that I have the problem, but it's happened with only two tabs.

CPU: 7 Processors Model: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3840QM CPU @ 2.80GHz

RAM: 4.2G used, 11G free

OS: Debian wheezy amd64

Will run memtester and respond with results.

I'm a bit new at this, so if any of these answers were not what you are looking for, please let me know. Thanks!

Certainly your hardware is not marginal in any sense.

I am not a Debian or gnome-shell/gnome-terminal user so will have to defer to others for things specific to them - although I can't imagine it being config related ("Number of chrome tabs before shell crashes, default=4")

It would be helpful to know if chrome was installed from the official repos or some other method. Has the OS been updated lately, and if so was it possibly interrupted or from some untrusted repo?

Unless you have a corrupted installation or filesystem I would look closely at the memtest as my first suspect.

I tried memtester with 512MB as the test size and ran it for two hours. It said everything was ok.

If I recall correctly, I just ran apt-get install chrome-stable, but I might have downloaded the .deb from Google and tried to manually install it and then forgotten about it.

I found out about Chromium and tried that and it doesn't seem to be causing the same problems, so I'll just stick with that.

Right before I found that fix I noticed that even without a valid command, the response would still pop up. E.g.:

Everything that I looked at refer to ulimit when I use this as search