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From: info-vax@ucbvax.ARPA
Newsgroups: fa.info-vax
Subject: removing inactive user's logins
Message-ID: <8034@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 11-Jun-85 02:54:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8034
Posted: Tue Jun 11 02:54:21 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 11-Jun-85 08:27:44 EDT
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Organization: University of California at Berkeley
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From: tom@maryland

The phone line and modem availability, and security issues mentioned
by Gail Rubin and Charlie Abzug are good reasons for having automatic
logout.  I expand here on one facet of the problem.

On UNIX systems particularly, inactive users tend to have a number
of processes.  Each process holds a slot in the fixed-size process
table, potentially preventing active users from forking new
processes.  

More seriously, each process holds a potentailly large part of the
system's swap disk (this is alleviated somewhat by re-entrant code
for popular processes).  This also can prevent forking new
processes.  Since everything (well, almost everything) you do in
UNIX is done by forking off a new process to do it, the system
becomes unusable (even though it may have many spare `crunchons').

Tom Melton
tom@maryland