Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!psuvax1!eds1!devon!ctdi!mikei
From: mikei@ctdi.UUCP (Mike Israel)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: RE: Process Limits
Message-ID: <793@ctdi.UUCP>
Date: 14 Dec 89 21:13:54 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Communications Test Design, Inc., West Chester, Pa.
Lines: 40



> 
> In article <791@ctdi.UUCP> I wrote:
> >I am having a problem which I am hoping a wizard can shed some light on.
> >
> >I am running AT&T Unix SYSV on an AT&T 386WGS with 16 meg of memory.  The
> >system is primarily used to run Ingres based applications and has 16 IPC
> >ports.
> >
> >The problem I am having is that once I reach approximately 40 processes
> >(As seen by "ps -eaf") an attempt to run another Ingres application
> >produces the message
> >
> >    "spawn system process table is temporarily full"
> >
> >I am fairly certain that I have run at least this many processes on other
> >386 systems without similiar problems.  Is there an upper limit to the
> >number of processes.


Thanks for the insights to all who provided them.  Oddly, it was not the
tunable system params which were causing the problem.  It turns out that 
one of our programmers had made a change to a file which resulted in an 
executable requiring about three meg of uninitialized data space.  Why this 
resulted in the above error is beyond me.  I would think we should have seen
some type of memory related error.  Anyway, the problem is now solved but 
thanks again for the information you did provide.  Maybe this info
will help you if you ever hit the same wall.


Michael A. Israel               ||  uucp: mikei@ctdi.UUCP
                               	||        ...!uunet!cbmvax!ctdi1!ctdi
Communications Test Design Inc.	||
West Chester, PA                || Please direct all complaints to /dev/null
-- 
Michael A. Israel               ||  uucp: mikei@ctdi.UUCP
                               	||        ...!uunet!cbmvax!ctdi1!ctdi
Communications Test Design Inc.	||
West Chester, PA                || Please direct all complaints to /dev/null