flexfax: Re: Faxmail error? HELP!!!

[Patrick Gardella <patrick@cre8tivegroup.com>]

On 30-Sep-97 Doug White wrote:
>On Tue, 30 Sep 1997, Patrick Gardella wrote:
>
>> I am running Hylafax 4.0pl1 on FreeBSD 2.2.1 on a Pentium 200 with 128 Megs
>> RAM.  Sendmail is 8.8.5.  Modems are seven Multitech Multimodems 2834ZDX on a
 Cy
>> clades8Yo multiport serial card. I'm sending this to both the HylaFAX and 
>> FreeBSD lists to get input from both parties. 
>
>OK, scratch login.conf.
>
>> All of them had the error code 2 that says "Cannot fork"
>> 
>> I've included some stats on the system to provide some clues to what
>> might be happening.
>
>You're running out of processes per child.  
>
>Try rebuilding your kernel with the following options:
>
>options         CHILD_MAX=128
>options         OPEN_MAX=128
>
>You might try just rebooting too.  I'd have to see a ps -ax to get a sense
>of what's going on.  hylafax may be leaking memory or file descriptors.

I've done this and will see what happens (kernel and reboot).  It may take a 
while to have this problem come up again, since this did not happen until
after almost 1 1/2 months of continuous running without a reboot.  

>> The kernel is compiled with  "maxusers" as 40 giving me 656 processes.
>
>That is somewhat loose; the above variables control this much more
>directly.
>
>Hm, there was one zombie process.  You might want to keep track of those
>and make sure they don't get too numerous.  A zombie process is one that's
>waiting for it's parent to recognize that it's dead.  If big apps (like
>faxmail or anything fax related) is getting stuck, it doesn't release it's
>resources until it's postiviely dead.  They're generally caused by
>programing errors related to not understanding the BSD process model.

The zombie processes have diappeared, by the time I went in to copy down 
the ps -ax data.  I did see that they were (hfaxd) and (faxq), before when
I first did ps -ax.

I'll keep everyone up to date.

Thanks Doug.

Patrick


P.S.  Doug, is maxusers ok at 40?  Or is there a better value?