Re: maximum number of processes on kernel 2.4.x

[Wayne Tucker <wtucker@donobi.com>]

On Tue, Mar 12, 2002 at 02:03:20AM +0100, Russell Coker wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Mar 2002 22:52, Wayne Tucker wrote:
> > Does anybody know how to change the maximum number of tasks/processes
> > available under the 2.4.x kernels, similar to tuning NR_TASKS and
> > MAX_TASKS_PER_USER in 2.2.x and 2.3.x?  Our mail software sometimes
> > requires a large number of processes, and we cannot ssh into the server
> > once the number of processes belonging to root reaches 256.
> >
> > Thanks for any help that you can provide,
> 
> Below is the relevant section of fork.c in kernel 2.4.18.  Whether having 
> half the system memory being used by non-swappable kernel data structures can 
> be considered "safe" is a matter of opinion.  But I don't think that running 
> out of process table space will be a problem for you (your machine will 
> probably be dead before you get there).
> 
> I guess that you have some problem related to ulimit...
> 
[snip]

Is the "default" number of processes allowed by ulimit/setrlimit
determined in the kernel, or is it being set from somewhere in the
init scripts?  Are resource limits inherited from the parent process,
and can the default for daemons be changed somewhere in the init
process so that they can be effective for daemon processes that start
on bootup?  The system does not have any users other than admins, so
for our purposes it would be safe for us to have RLIMIT_NPROC set to
something higher such as 512.

Many thanks,

Wayne


-- 
Wayne A. Tucker - wtucker@donobi.com
Network Engineer, Donobi Inc.