UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

You should not need to do anything to use installed memory. "prtconf | head" will display how much memory the sytem thinks is installed.

Look at column 5 on vmstat. That is how much free memory you have (in kilobytes). You have over 10 gigabytes of memory free. To be able to use that you must have virtual swap available. You have 37 Gigabytes. You simply have plenty of memory. And you have the swap to use it.

It looks like you tried /dev/kmem instead of /dev/mem on the "fork_fail_pending" command. But I believe it will be zero if procovf is zero. If procovf is not being incremented, you have not run out of process slots.

Memory that can be allocated and slots in the process table are really the only two things that the kernel needs to be able to fork. You have enough of both of those.

There is one more thing to check, but it is a long shot. Try the following three commands:
kstat -p "unix:0:var:v_proc"
kstat -p "unix:0:var:v_maxup"
kstat -p "unix:0:var:v_maxupttl"
The first one should be 30000 and the last two should be 29995. If these three values are correct then I simply do not believe that your system is having any trouble forking.

Instead I think it is time to look at your peoplesoft program. It is probably incorrect in saying that it cannot fork.

That is why I asked about other users. Recreate the problem where peoplesoft thinks that it cannot fork. Leave it like that. Sign on as another user. Type "ksh". Your shell will run ksh which will give you a prompt. Type "ksh" again. And again. And again. Each time that you do this the shell is forking another process. If your shells can fork, why not people soft? After you do this for a few levels, type "ps -f" to see all the new processes you created.

And no, I don't know of a program to intentionally burn memory.

Thanks again for all your help Perderabo.

I solved the problem. It was concerning the exact numbers and specific paramters in the /etc/system files. It had to be exact. Semophores and shared memory related.

Thanks again. You are good.

By the way what does Perderabo mean?

Oh one more thing. I have a top utility. How do I uninstall it?

I'm glad that you figured this out. I hope that you yelled at the authors of the package. "can't fork" is not a good way to inform the user that you need more semaphores or shared memory. And I wince when I think of the 8 Gigs of memory that you bought...

Thanks for the kind words. I must mention that nine tenths of knowledge came from a single source: SOLARIS Internals by Jim Mauro and Richard McDougall (ISBN 0-13-022496-0). It's a wonderful book and I highly recommend it.

Since I don't know how you installed top, I can't tell you the precise steps to uninstall it. It comes from the public domain. In my case, I install top by ftp'ing it to /usr/local/bin. I could uninstall it with a simple "rm /usr/local/bin/top". Unless your top does not match your release of solaris, I don't know why you'd want to remove it. It is actually a great program.

I don't know what "Perderabo" means. (What does greddy09sc mean?) I wanted a name that sounded daemonic and Perderabo seems to meet that criterion. I also wanted a name so obscure that no one else on any web site would also pick it.....well one out of two isn't bad....

I can tell you where it came from. HP Lovecraft often wrote stories that mentioned a fictional book called the Necronomicon (sp?). Other authors also borrowed this title and it popped up in lots of horror stories. Eventually some would-be occultists convinced themselves that it is real. And someone actually wrote a book by the title. In the intro, he thanks "the great demon Perderabo". Now you know as much as I do about it.

(At other sites I have learned that some people know very much more about my name. If someone out there falls into that category, spare me, I'm really not that interested in my nom de guerre.)

greddy09sc is a screen name I first started using years ago. It kinda got stuck to me since it is unique. greddy is a name brand for car performance parts, ie: exhaust, headers, turbo, etc. 09sc means 9 seconds --> time it takes for a car to run a quarter mile. Back when I created my screen name, a 9 second quarter mile by an import car was impossible. Now, there is 7 seconds running import cars.

I am so far surpass all of this import car racing "stuff". I just kept the screen name.

I will check out that book that you recommended. Well, most likely I will buy it since you are so good, at least that's how you sound : )