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magra
Contributor
Contributor

-bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

Hello

I still have a special problem on a VMware "ESX Server 3.5.0 - 123630" (latest Release - Update 3), who is running on a "HP Proliant 585 G2" with 20GB RAM.

If I boot the host, the host is running for about 4 days without problems. Then suddenly I can't login. On an already Logged-In session, I can't run most commands. I get always the following message:

-bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

If I go to the /proc subfolder and count all processes with following commands:

cd /proc

declare -i n

n=0

for i in *

do

n=n+1

echo $n

done

I get 4326 processes. On an other host, who is running without any problems, I have just about 150 processes.

I tried do kill the highest PIDs with the kill command, but without success.

Could someone imagine why I have so many processes on this host? Does someone knows, how do I can kill some processes to get free resources?

Many thanks for any ideas.

Martin

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2 Replies
Texiwill
Leadership
Leadership

Hello,

Sounds like a process has gone out of control. You will most likely need to power off all VMs within the Host then reboot the host. Once powered off and rebooted move the VMs quickly to your other host and then investigate /var/log/messages to see what process went out of control. Do you have any scripts/agents you added to the host? Is it at the latest patch level?

_fork No Resources is a very bad sign.


Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

Blue Gears and SearchVMware Pro Blogs: http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Blog_Roll

Top Virtualization Security Links: http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Top_Virtualization_Security_Links

--
Edward L. Haletky
vExpert XIV: 2009-2023,
VMTN Community Moderator
vSphere Upgrade Saga: https://www.astroarch.com/blogs
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/Texiwill
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magra
Contributor
Contributor

Hello,

I found out the reason. It is the cimservera processes, who makes this problem. There is now also a KB Report from VMware.

So I'm waiting for the Patch. For the meantime I created a scheduled task which restart every day the pegasus service.

Best Regards

Martin

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