[cobalt-users] Fork bomb?

["Chris Demain" <cdemain@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all.
Over the weekend my XTR locked up.  It repeated this behavior Monday
morning, and again Tuesday.  After some detective work, it appears to be a
problem with rotating logs.  The specific error message clue is:
sh: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
After some research, I found that Cobalt set the max number of processes in
the kernel (2.2.x kernel has a process cap, where 2.4.x does not) of 512,
which sounds ridiculously low ... especially for a 933MHz machine with 512M
RAM.
The failure occurs while logrotated execs analog.  At this point, the number
of processes spikes from about 90 to well over 300.  During this, sh
zombies:

[admin admin]$ ps axuwww | grep Z
USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root     26565  0.0  0.0     0    0 pts/0    Z    12:36   0:00 [sh
<defunct>]
it is at this point that I get the fork error.
I have replaced the *-C1 analog and logrotated packaged with RHL 6.2
i386.rpms, thinking that a newer version may solve the issue, but it didn't.

My question is, then, has anyone seen this? If so, is there a fix or a
workaround?   Does Sun/Cobalt have any plan whatsoever to migrate to a
2.4.x-based distribution?

Thanks in advance,
--
Chris Demain                                     cdemain@xxxxxxxxxxx
Systems Administrator                           (813) 839-7242 x3022
Sago Networks                              <http://www.sagonet.com/>
--
"The world is a very strange carrot, but the farmer is not worried at all"