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Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 20:00:29 -0700 (PDT)
From: Toby Burress <tburress@sjca.edu>
To: freebsd-gnats-submit@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Cron calling periodic spawns hundreds of sh
X-Send-Pr-Version: www-1.0

>Number:         41741
>Category:       i386
>Synopsis:       Cron calling periodic spawns hundreds of sh
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       low
>Responsible:    ceri
>State:          closed
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:  
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Fri Aug 16 20:10:05 PDT 2002
>Closed-Date:    Sun Jun 08 11:03:46 PDT 2003
>Last-Modified:  Sun Jun 08 11:03:46 PDT 2003
>Originator:     Toby Burress
>Release:        4.6-STABLE, 4.6-RELEASE
>Organization:
>Environment:
FreeBSD newton.kurin.d2g.com 4.6-STABLE FreeBSD 4.6-STABLE #1: Tue Aug 13 13:24:27 EDT 2002     root@:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/NEWTON  i386
>Description:
I have an Intel Celeron 333 with 208MB of RAM.  Whenever Periodic is called by cron, so many sh will spawn that all processes lock up and I get "bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable" and have to hard-reboot.  As root (under csh) the error simply is "no more processes."
>How-To-Repeat:
I think this problem is very hardware specific, as Google searches result in nothing and neither have I found anything here, but there have been no other odd errors (I've built world from -RELEASE to -STABLE with no problem) and I can call periodic manually with no problem.  To repeat the problem, simply let cron call periodic daily|weekly|monthly.
>Fix:
No known fix.  Comment out the cron and do it manually.
>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
State-Changed-From-To: open->feedback 
State-Changed-By: schweikh 
State-Changed-When: Sat Aug 17 00:31:48 PDT 2002 
State-Changed-Why:  
Toby, this doesn't seem to be HW related (I've had a celeron 333 with 
128M ram until recently and periodic ran fine; actually I even 
overclocked the CPU to 415). Unfortunately you gave no information that 
would allow us to identify the bug. It might be a config problem, a 
broken shell script, or even a file system or kernel bug. I suggest you 
try updating your system to -stable via cvsup (see handbook) and do not 
forget to update the files in /etc using mergemaster(8). Let us know if 
the problem persists or not. Thanks! 

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=41741 
State-Changed-From-To: feedback->closed 
State-Changed-By: ceri 
State-Changed-When: Sun Jun 8 11:03:42 PDT 2003 
State-Changed-Why:  
Feedback timeout (6 months or more). 
I will handle any feedback that this closure generates. 


Responsible-Changed-From-To: freebsd-bugs->ceri 
Responsible-Changed-By: ceri 
Responsible-Changed-When: Sun Jun 8 11:03:42 PDT 2003 
Responsible-Changed-Why:  
Feedback timeout (6 months or more). 
I will handle any feedback that this closure generates. 

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=41741 
>Unformatted:
