Subject: Re: easy ways to crash your NetBSD system
To: Phil Knaack <flipk@ncremp.ag.iastate.edu>
From: Dave Huang <khym@apm2-72.realtime.net>
List: current-users
Date: 04/05/1996 19:42:00
On Fri, 5 Apr 1996, Phil Knaack wrote:
> I just tried that little forker (phonetic pun intended), and this is
> exactly what happened.. the system was sluggish, the mouse in X froze
> up every few seconds, but I was able to do something about it.
> 
> My machine is a P5/90 with 16M ram, and the max number of processes 
> allowed per user is 80 (that is enough for most people, isn't it?).
> No matter what I tried, running various fork()ing programs, I couldn't
> get the machine to crash, or come to a _complete_ halt.

Try doing an "unlimit maxproc" (in csh) before running the forker... With
maxproc limited to 80 (the default, apparently), I got the same results as
you did. But "unlmit maxproc" raised the limit to 532, which made the
forker panic my machine with a "vm_map_entry_create: out of map entries". 
This is on a P5/100 with 48M ram, although it did the same thing when I 
had 16M...
--
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INet: khym@bga.com   |   they raise a paw / the bat, the cat /
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