Hi Folks,
I think I saw this before in the past, but ignored it because it never
happened to me. Now it has, so I'm looking for a solution.
An old 3000/500 AXP system running OSF/1 v1.3b is one of our operational
systems controlling a real time image processing system. The operator
account occassionally gets a "No more processes" error message at the
shell when the main processing program has been run for a long time.
At first, we thought it might actually be a limit of processing slots
or something like it, so we bumped up the maxusers parameter in /sys/conf
up to 64 from 32. This didn't help, and the symptoms were not consistent
with actually running out of system resources. We could still log in to
the system under all the accounts, just that once the operator account
is logged in, any non-shell commands returns "No more processes".
At this time, the main program has been running for a while and is in
an idle state. VSS is at about 30 MB, and RSS is at about 16 MB. The
system has 128 MB RAM and about 200 MB swap. So none of the currently
logged in operator accounts can do anything, while all the other logged
in accounts work just fine. Then, we terminate the main program, and
suddenly, everything seems normal again. A new session of the main
program is started again, and everything runs fine until at some point,
again, none of the operator accounts can do anything.
Our work-around is to have the operators run that main program for so long
and shut it down and restart it again. My guess is that there is some
resource that is not being properly returned to the system such as
memory or file descriptors or something else that affects all processes
run by that account. But we can't easily tell what it is using ps to
look at the process.
Does anyone have any insights as to what the problem might be, or how
to scan the systme resources to see what might be preventing the one
acount from working? So the limits displayed by the "limit" command
apply to all processes run by the same account?
thanks in advance for any information
eyc
Received on Wed Aug 19 1998 - 22:53:52 NZST