Re: Maximum number of processes in Linux

[Helge Hafting <helge.hafting@aitel.hist.no>]

linux-os (Dick Johnson) wrote:
> Yep....
>
> #include <stdio.h>
> #include <signal.h>
> int main()
> {
>      unsigned long i;
>      for(i = 0; ; i++)
>      {
>          switch(fork())
>          {
>          case 0:		// kid
>  	pause();
>          break;
>          case -1:	// Failed
>          printf("%lu\n", i);
>              kill(0, SIGTERM);
>              exit(0);
>          default:
>              break;
>          }
>      }
>      return 0;
> }
>
> Shows a consistent 6140.
>   
Doesn't work here.  Without ulimit, I wasn't surprised
about the resulting OOM mess. 

Problem was, it never stopped.  I expected OOM to kill
this program, and quite possibly lots of other running programs
as well.  What I got, was ever-rolling OOM messages
with stack traces inbetween. 
2.6.18-rc4-mm1 never recovered and had to be killed by sysrq.

Helge Hafting