I think I may be beating-up one of my servers too badly, but I'm not sure what the hard limits are within the 2.4 Kernel.
I have a server running right now with about 250 processes. About 150 of those are Java VM processes, each with between 20-100 of its own threads. A couple have many more threads, one has ~430 threads, the other ~220. Of course, each thread gets its own PID, and overall the system is running at about 2600 PID's allocated (again, to about 250 processes, 150 of which are Java VM's). Each JVM has a unique User ID, so the problems we're experiencing are not, I would think, related to a per-user limitation.
We're starting to see the server fail to execute new processes (such as killall or shutdown!) with a "segmentation fault" and the server is, at times, dead in the water until it gets itself a hard reboot. Actually I have a couple tricks to get around a hard reboot but they're not pretty. The server's memory and swap are no where near exhausted, and the CPU util. is relatively low.
Anyhow, my questions:
1. Am I brushing up against some limitations of the kernel here? Or is there something else I may be missing afoot?
2. If there is a limitation to the # of PID's the kernel will dole out, is this limitation limited explicitely to threads, or is it a matter of total # of processes?
3. I've noticed that the stock Red Hat 9 kernel more gracefully reports a single process per Java VM rather than showing all threads (at least when querying with a 'ps xauwww'). Is the above (presumed) limitation still implicit, or does it go away once threads are no longer assigned their own PID? The implication here is, should I go through a painful upgrade to solve the problem, or should I find a more interesting problem?
4. Are there any good solutions to this issue without upgrading? Perhaps customizing the kernel somehow?
TIA,
-Fred
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