exim/cron causes process pollution? Can't fork -> reboot

[Hannu Koivisto <azure@iki.fi>]

Greetings,

Since I replaced smail with exim (2.04-3) last Saturday or so I
have had to boot the machine two or three times because no new
processes can't have been started. "vfork: resource temporarily
unavailable" is what my shell (zsh) says. If, with echo `<
file`, I examine the contents of /proc filesystem, I see _many_
cron processes. Too many, it seems. I don't think the process
count is hitting kernel's default limit of 512 processes (IIRC).

This booting is rather unpleasant as the machine is our router,
{DNS, www proxy, mysql, samba, nfs, canna, skk, apache, ppp,
print, my emacs :)} server so if anyone has had similar
experiences, I'd like to know ASAP. I'm not sure if switching to
exim is the actual cause -- I did update several packages about
day or two before switched to exim, but the first time I saw
this happen was pretty immediately after this switch.

FWIW, kernel is 2.1.117ac3/x86.

Good ideas about how to trace the cause of the problem are also
appreciated. Logs haven't revealed anything relevant.

Thanks in advance,
//Hannu