[ale] max number of processes

[Eric Z. Ayers]

Marc Vogt writes:
...
 > Thanks.  Mine was set to NR_TASKS/2 so the fact that I am running out
 > of processes a lot of the time would seem to point to a problem
 > with some software.  I've only got one user (me) as this is my home
 > desktop machine.  It seems to be about every 20 or so days that that
 > user runs out of processes.  I can't really see from 'top' or 'ps' any
 > unusual buildup of stale processes or anything like that so I'm not sure
 > what's going on.  

That's weird, because we routinely get a lot better uptime than that!
Maybe a bug in the particular Kernel rev you are running (I've never
heard of it)?    Try ls /proc and see how many directories are there
with numbers and compare it to the output of 'ps auxww' and see if
maybe there aren't some discrepencies. 

 > I guess rebooting every 20 days isn't so bad compared
 > to MS but it is bad compared to our SGI at work that has 249 days uptime. :)
 > 
 > So that still leaves me with a couple questions that some of you might
 > know something about.  Would it be okay to set MAX_TASKS_PER_USER to
 > anything higher than NR_TASKS/2? 

It shouldn't be a problem, at least, it hasn't been a problem with
non-linux flavors of UNIX I've used.  MAX_TASKS_PER_USER is meant to keep a
single user on the system from hogging all of the processes.  But if
your machine has only one real user, than it isn't a big deal.  If you 
are serving a population of hundreds of concurrent users, setting
MAX_TASKS_PER_USER down to a lower value might be in order.

 > And what's the deal with the 4 reserved
 > processes for root? 

That's pretty easy to explain.  If some user tasks use up all the
processes in the system, you want someone to be able to login as root
and kill them!  
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