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From: allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Help!  Altos 5.3.1 fork is failing!
Message-ID: <1989Oct20.020309.2081@NCoast.ORG>
Date: 20 Oct 89 02:03:09 GMT
References: <506@oglvee.UUCP>
Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery)
Followup-To: comp.unix.i386
Organization: North Coast Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, OH
Lines: 27

As quoted from <506@oglvee.UUCP> by jr@oglvee.UUCP (Jim Rosenberg):
+---------------
| We just recently "upgraded" [sic] an Altos 2000 from Xenix 5.2c to UNIX 5.3d.
| per-user limit is 30, and we're getting fork failures where that's not exceeded
| either.  The system error reporting is filled with messages like this:
+---------------

Ah, so someone else *is* getting those little buggers.

As far as I can tell, "fork failed"s happen when memory is mostly full and
something wants to fork and for some stupid reason Altos 5.3[a-d][DT][0-9]
doesn't want to page anything out to make more room in core even though it can
do so.  I have some "sar" output that corroborates this, "fork failed" happens
when a process tries to fork and there are < 100 free 512-byte (I think that's
the units sar uses, I need to check) chunks of memory.

I plan to ram this down Altos T/S's collective throat, since they haven't
fixed it in 5.3dT1 and I reported it in 5.3bT1 (3 upgrades have gone by so
far...).

++Brandon, for this message speaking as the tech guru of telotech, inc.
-- 
Brandon S. Allbery, moderator of comp.sources.misc	     allbery@NCoast.ORG
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