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Zimwy · Jun 12, 2003, 10:03 PM

Hi,
What is going on!? My computer gets to the point where when I run "ls" in a terminal it says "No more processes" and gives me another prompt. I can't run ANYTHING. Have I actually run out of process numbers? I quit a program and then ran top, an dthe highest number was 8192, that's not too high! I have a gig of ram. Does anybody have any advice? I know I can restart to solve this problem now, but that has happened before. Any ideas?

Thanks,
gabe

absmiths · Jun 13, 2003, 10:18 AM

Originally posted by Zimwy:
Hi,
What is going on!? My computer gets to the point where when I run "ls" in a terminal it says "No more processes" and gives me another prompt. I can't run ANYTHING. Have I actually run out of process numbers? I quit a program and then ran top, an dthe highest number was 8192, that's not too high! I have a gig of ram. Does anybody have any advice? I know I can restart to solve this problem now, but that has happened before. Any ideas?

Thanks,
gabe

The problem isn't the process ID or the amount of RAM - there is a fixed limit to how many processes a shell (or the system as a whole) may execute. Once you run out of processes you are pretty stuck since you generally require a process to stop one.

I would log out of the GUI to free up any windowserver processes, and then stop anything that might be spawning lots of processes.

If this happens often you are going to have to tame something down or your system will be unusable.

drmbb2 · Jun 13, 2003, 11:43 AM

I think I'm correct in this - note that while the system has unlimited processes resource limits, users may have no more than 100 symultaneously running processes (at least according to my returns from "ulimit" in an sh shell). How many apps are you running, shells, etc are you running?

Zimwy · Jun 13, 2003, 03:34 PM

I don't remember exactly how many things I was running, but it was nothing extraodrinary. I've done more and things have been fine.

Whenever this happens I also can't run fork() or anything like that. So no man pages or anything like that. I'm going to reformat soon and hopefully that will fix things, but I don't know what's going on at all.

gabe

CatOne · Jun 13, 2003, 10:31 PM

Originally posted by Zimwy:
I don't remember exactly how many things I was running, but it was nothing extraodrinary. I've done more and things have been fine.

Whenever this happens I also can't run fork() or anything like that. So no man pages or anything like that. I'm going to reformat soon and hopefully that will fix things, but I don't know what's going on at all.

gabe

Why would reformat fix anything? Your disk isn't related to this.

How many processes really did you have?

Zimwy · Jun 14, 2003, 01:46 PM

How can I find out how many processess exactly that I had? I was running about 6 or 7 apps including the finder. I had Apache, SSH Access, GNUMP3d, all on. That's about it.

gabe