For some reason whenever I run almost any command, I am getting the error "fork: resource temporarily unavailable". I can't work out why. When I first log in, I am able to do "ls" on my home dir, but if I do cd /, then ls, I get that error message. Same goes with any other commands. Anyone know what the problem could be?

this might help..

http://www.linux.org.za/Lists-Archiv.../msg00693.html

After using Bastillia under Ubuntu 10.10 I've got hundreds of that message: "fork: resource temporarily unavailable".
I found out that this bloody program adds some limits to system resources
usage. I went to /etc/secutity/limits.conf and deleted:

# prevent core dumps
* hard core 0

#limit user processes per user to 150
* soft nproc 100
* hard nproc 150

------------------------------
Back up!Back up!Back up!Your system.

Just had an issue and solved it on red hat 5 getting error: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

Research we did found this:
1. cron run scripts do not fully logon as the user. So if ulimit commands are issued in /etc/profile they will not get run when cron scripts run.

2. In dealing with user oracle on a machine with many databases, we found the ulimit -u to cause the issue. We had 800 oracle processes running (shows with ps -ef|grep oracle|wc -l), but a bash shell would work ok with ulimit -u 2020 but would fail with ulimit -u 2010.

Turns out process limits must be a misnomer. Must include threads also. This command shows a number closer to our experience of what ulimit -u needed: ps -eLf|grep oracle|egrep -v root|wc -l

So the bottom line is, make sure your ulimit -u is set high enough when dealing with workloads such as oracle.

1 members found this post helpful.