We are having the following behaviour in one of the servers. We can't connect through ssh with the user id (orawl), but we can connect to the server using differing users. Then when I try to run the su - orawl command I received the following message error:

[root@host ~]# su - orawl
su: cannot set user id: Resource temporarily unavailable

The values of the limits.conf are this:

/etc/security/limits.conf

#* soft core 0
#* hard rss 10000
#@student hard nproc 20
#@faculty soft nproc 20
#@faculty hard nproc 50
#ftp hard nproc 0
#@student - maxlogins 4

# End of file

# Oracle
orawl soft nproc 5120
orawl hard nproc 26384
orawl soft nofile 1024
orawl hard nofile 75536

# archivo maximo de 25GB
orawl hard fsize 102760448

Not even one of the hard limits in the configuration are reached .

#Number of processes
ps -eFL | grep -i orawl | wc -l
5126

#Number of files
lsof -u orawl | wc -l
13714

Where I ' am missing ?.

Hope somebody can help me.

Thanks in advice

5126 processes for that user, sounds crazy to me!
Check what those processes are, maybe some app is misbehaving and spawning lots of processes?
Then kill as many as you can.

The process are from Java Application Server. There could be a bunch of threads spawning by the process. But in other server, for example I check the number of processes and some times are bigger than the user has in this server, but in the other server I'm able to login. The application is in cluster so the other servers that belongs to the cluster has the same limits values. It look's like that I reached one threshold but I don't know , what could be.

Thanks for your reply.