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Date:      Thu, 11 Sep 1997 13:18:56 -0700
From:      Brian Litzinger <brian@worldcontrol.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   How do I allocate resources appropriately?
Message-ID:  <19970911131856.59535@top.mediacity.com>

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I run various -current and 2.2.2 systems.

I sometimes run into what I believe are resource shortages which
manifest themselves as 'Cannot fork' error messages from various
programs at various times.

qmail, some perl scripts, and a few other programs do this.

In the past I have haphazardly increased the size of various kernal
structures via the 'MAXUSERS' option in the kernel config.

Things running as root do not seem to manifest this behavior and
root in login.conf is mostly set to unlimited for resources.

The programs which experience the 'Cannot fork' behavior are generally
running as non-root, so at times I've increased the limits in the
login.conf for those users, which seems to alleviate the problems.

However, my changes feel alot like guesses.  Is there a more well
defined way to identify resource shortages?  Or shall I continuing
using the Force? 8-)

The shortages occur in qmail when processing large mailing lists, and
in the httpd server when running alot of cgi-bin perl scripts.

If the solution is to manipulate login.conf, what are good upper
limits for uids I want to have maximal use of resources, but not
break things?

Thanks,
--
brian



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