[Gllug] Restricting the number of child procs

[John Hearns]

On Fri, 2008-07-04 at 15:27 +0100, Frazer Irving wrote:
> Hi everybody, 
> 
> I'm currently having trouble with a Perl script running on a Solaris
> server. The script forks quite a bit and it seems that when the server
> is under any sort of load the fork calls fail, 

Talking about fork failures, I had a case yesterday on a cluster. System
head node locks up, no more logins, cannot fork any further processes
due to maximum number of files open. Not possible to log into the
console.
Luckily, we had an ssh session already open on it. Most commands don't
work of course, and we're reluctant to pull the power on it as this is a
live system.

echo 2000000 > /proc/sys/fs/file-max revives things for about 30 seconds
(now there's a bit of systems-fu for you)

echo 20000000 > /proc/sys/fs/file-max keeps it up long enough for us to
find out the rogue job and delete it.

Sadly, commercial etiquette prevents me from carrying a large LART in
the boot of the car.


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