Bug 41741

Summary:	Cron calling periodic spawns hundreds of sh
Product:	Base System	Reporter:	Toby Burress <tburress>
Component:	i386	Assignee:	Ceri Davies <ceri>
Status:	Closed FIXED
Severity:	Affects Only Me
Priority:	Normal
Version:	4.6-STABLE
Hardware:	Any
OS:	Any

Description Toby Burress 2002-08-17 04:10:05 UTC

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."

Fix: 

No known fix.  Comment out the cron and do it manually.
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.

Comment 1 Jens Schweikhardt freebsd_committer

2002-08-17 08:31:48 UTC

State Changed
From-To: open->feedback

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!

Comment 2 Ceri Davies freebsd_committer

2003-06-08 19:03:42 UTC

State Changed
From-To: feedback->closed

Feedback timeout (6 months or more). 
I will handle any feedback that this closure generates.

Comment 3 Ceri Davies freebsd_committer

2003-06-08 19:03:42 UTC

Responsible Changed
From-To: freebsd-bugs->ceri

Feedback timeout (6 months or more). 
I will handle any feedback that this closure generates.