0403-030 The fork failed. Too many prossesses already exist

[Roomer]

..anyone seen this before? How did you rectify it?

Thanks

Roomer

 

[KenCunningham]

Have you many defunct processes? ps -ef | grep defunct. These may be tying up resources. If you have, you may need to reboot the box to get rid of them. Is this a recurring problem?

 

[AIXSPadmin]

It is self-descripting, telling you everything you need to know. There are too many processes running so it cannot fork another process.

Unless you can identify what is using so many processes and find a way to kill them (given that you cannot fork a new process,) otherwise, you will have to reboot.

 

[victorv]

hi,
I am sure that some years ago (when the servers had little
disks and memory), this message was symptom of low paging
space.

Use topas and monitor your system to see how many
process are in, which, and the ps trend.

bye

 

[AIXSPadmin]

And how do you expect him to run anything since that would require a new process?

 

[AIXSPadmin]

When the number of free paging-space blocks falls below a threshold known as the paging-space warning level, the system informs all processes except kproc, of this condition by sending the SIGDANGER signal.

There are a number of messages that you could see from this condition, with the above warning being one of them.

 

[zmeistr]

We experienced this problem last week. AIX support told us to up the number of processes allowed per user to 5000. It was set at 999 when the "fork" error occured and our processes were up to 3683 (ps -ef | wc -l). When we looked at our processes (ps aux) we saw several defunct zombied ones, too many to kill by hand so we had to reboot that night. We have been having paging space problems for a while and thought this might help us find what's happening. Now our paging space is climbing about 9%-13% a night and no defunct processes are showing. Anyone have any ideas?