new fork issues; preventing shutdown

[Thomas Klausner <tk%giga.or.at@localhost>]

Hi!

I updated to 8.99.6 from yesterday and then started a bulk build.
After a very short while it was hung and I couldn't connect from
outside. When I came back to the console, I saw that it had run out of
resources and couldn't fork anything.

There were a lot of processes called "Build", probably from one of the
packages in the bulk build.

I couldn't even shutdown, because zsh couldn't fork shutdown, nor did
pressing the power button help, because the powerd script couldn't be
forked.

/var/log/messages had:
/netbsd: proc: table is full - increase kern.maxproc or NPROC
and
powerd[932]: fork to run script: Resource temporarily unavailable

I wonder why I suddenly see this behaviour in 8.99.6, I haven't seen
that before (I was using 8.99.5 from October before).

And I also wonder if at least the shutdown could be improved in case
of fork problems.

And I finally wonder if kern.maxproc should have a better default, or
be autosized.

Ideas?
 Thomas