limit for number of processes

[Uman <a.lahun@editec-lotteries.com>]

hello.
Yesterday when i wrote program which use fork for every connection, and
made stupid mistake. So i tested my PC(kernel 2.4.3-pre2+xfs) with 
something like
while(1){
fork();
}
i had ulimit 4000 processes  but my box became completely unresponsible 
in X.
As i understood it started to use swap intensively . But amount of 
memory was enough
so no OOM killing. The only thing i could do is to reboot.
After testing  i found that if i create up to 3200 processes i still can 
Ctrl-C  and everything
will be good. If i have more i can kill them but  kernel threads , as i 
understand, continue
to thrash system and the only thing i can do Sys-Rq. 
So my question is , what is amount of processes kernel can support (if  
i have enough memory)
without  thrashing  my system  and requiring reboot for  normal job.
Thank you.
Andrei.


--
To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in
the body to majordomo@kvack.org.  For more info on Linux MM,
see: http://www.linux.eu.org/Linux-MM/