Not enough space: couldn't spawn child process

[Maven]

I'm running Solaris 8 with Apache 1.3.9.

The websites hosted are what some might consider high traffic, in excess of 5 million impressions a month. Everything works fine until the max httpd processes exceed about 120. At that point, all cgi scripts on all websites result in (12)Not enough space: couldn't spawn child process: (script file)" The server is a sun sparc 20 with +310 RAM and only runs apache on it, so I can't see why this is happening. The servers max users and processes are plenty, apache is configured for a good amount of traffic, higher than the default. I've tried a thousand things and none seem to work. From my research, this error is output from the perl programs forking, and not having enough space (I have no idea what "space" it is refering to), which causes mod_cgi to output the error. The server resources are fine, and everything but apache works perfectly. Even apache works fine before that 120ish mark of processes.

Any help would be very greatly appreciated.

 

[MeTo]

Did you find out the answer to this? I am having the same problem. Except, mine is a low volume site. In fact, everything seems to work fine. I haven't had any complaints about problems. I just have these error messages. I can't tell why it is trying to fork, let alone why it can't.

 

[Guest_imported]

I know this may be a silly question, but did you look at /var/apache/logs/error_log? The logfiles can be very revealing and I've found and fixed several problems by correlating my error_log messages with my scripts and files. And I know many people who have problems, but they don't review their logfiles as part of their trouble shooting.