*BSD News Article 67969


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From: Craig Shaver <craig@progroup.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Lack of processes?
Date: Wed, 08 May 1996 01:50:59 -0700
Organization: Productivity Group, Inc.
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Message-ID: <31906073.2781E494@progroup.com>
References: <4mj9kc$a2a@tatooine.vader.org>
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To: Chris Dabrowski <chris@vader.org>

Chris Dabrowski wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know what could be causing these error messages:
> 
> May  5 05:31:09 tatooine innd: ME cant spawn /news/bin/control/newgroup
> for control/newgroup/17509 Resource temporarily unavailable
del ...

I am not sure if this is process related or descriptor related.
I have seen the same thing.

> 
> I'm running FreeBSD-2.1 STABLE with MAXUSERS (in the kernel) set to 64. I
> have tried setting it other values all to no avail. Is there any way of
> increasing the number of processes?

I set mine to 32 and got something like 1064 max fds system wide.  The maxusers
also controls the number of processes.  At 32 I should be getting 532 processes.

per param.c in the compile/"your.kernel"


#define NPROC (20 + 16 * MAXUSERS)
int     maxproc = NPROC;                        /* maximum # of processes */
int     maxprocperuid = NPROC-1;                /* maximum # of processes per user
*/ 
int     maxfiles = NPROC*2;                     /* system wide open files limit */
int     maxfilesperproc = NPROC*2;              /* per-process open files limit */
int     ncallout = 16 + NPROC;                  /* maximum # of timer events */

I could not find where CHILD_MAX or OPEN_MAX were used in the code.

> 
> I use my machine to run X, inn, named, nfs (client & server), apache,
> samba and sendmail (from inetd) so the number of processes can get quite
> large (about 70), but when the above occurred I wasn't even running X.
> 

I am running 75 now with X ....

> Any advice would be appreciated. I've had a look as some man pages (sysctl)
> and the FAQ and Handbook but it hasn't helped. The Handbook states that
> the number of processes is equal to 20 + (16 * MAXUSERS) or in my case 1044
> which should be more than enough.
del ...

You may want to recompile inn with the number of descriptors set to something.
I use 128 and it works so far.  Innd tries to take all of the descriptors 
available.

YMMV, let me know what happens....

-- 
Craig Shaver  (craig@progroup.com) (415)390-0654 
Productivity Group POB 60458 Sunnyvale, CA  94088