flexfax: Re: Faxmail error? HELP!!!

[Doug White <dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu>]

On Tue, 30 Sep 1997, Patrick Gardella wrote:

> I am running Hylafax 4.0pl1 on FreeBSD 2.2.1 on a Pentium 200 with 128 Megs
> RAM.  Sendmail is 8.8.5.  Modems are seven Multitech Multimodems 2834ZDX on a Cy
> clades8Yo multiport serial card. I'm sending this to both the HylaFAX and 
> FreeBSD lists to get input from both parties. 

OK, scratch login.conf.

> All of them had the error code 2 that says "Cannot fork"
> 
> I've included some stats on the system to provide some clues to what
> might be happening.

You're running out of processes per child.  

Try rebuilding your kernel with the following options:

options         CHILD_MAX=128
options         OPEN_MAX=128

You might try just rebooting too.  I'd have to see a ps -ax to get a sense
of what's going on.  hylafax may be leaking memory or file descriptors.

> The kernel is compiled with  "maxusers" as 40 giving me 656 processes.

That is somewhat loose; the above variables control this much more
directly.

Hm, there was one zombie process.  You might want to keep track of those
and make sure they don't get too numerous.  A zombie process is one that's
waiting for it's parent to recognize that it's dead.  If big apps (like
faxmail or anything fax related) is getting stuck, it doesn't release it's
resources until it's postiviely dead.  They're generally caused by
programing errors related to not understanding the BSD process model.

Doug White                              | University of Oregon  
Internet:  dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu    | Residence Networking Assistant
http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite    | Computer Science Major