ulimit - EXPLAIN PLEASE

[newbie_01]

Hi all,

I wish I have a friendly SA but I don't. Can't even bother telling me what is the server's ulimit settings, it is either he doesn't know himself or just don't want to.

Anyway, I just want to know if someone can please explain what the following ulimit settings suggest/mean, mainly nofile and nproc of the non-root account.

I am getting errors like "cannot fork [Resource temporarily unavailable]" and am wanting to check whether any of my ulimit settings has been breached. Is there any config file that I can check to confirm what are the current ulimit settings? Don't think running ulimit -a as root shows the server ulimit settings, does it?

Any help will be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.


ulimit -a:

--------
As root:
--------

core file size (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size (kbytes, -d) unlimited
scheduling priority (-e) 0
file size (blocks, -f) unlimited
pending signals (-i) 288768
max locked memory (kbytes, -l) 32
max memory size (kbytes, -m) unlimited
open files (-n) 1024
pipe size (512 bytes, -p) 8
POSIX message queues (bytes, -q) 819200
real-time priority (-r) 0
stack size (kbytes, -s) 10240
cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes (-u) unlimited
virtual memory (kbytes, -v) unlimited
file locks (-x) unlimited

---------------------------
As a non-root UNIX account:
---------------------------

address space limit (kbytes) (-M) unlimited
core file size (blocks) (-c) 0
cpu time (seconds) (-t) unlimited
data size (kbytes) (-d) unlimited
file size (blocks) (-f) unlimited
locks (-L) unlimited
locked address space (kbytes) (-l) 32
nofile (-n) 4096
nproc (-u) 4096
pipe buffer size (bytes) (-p) 4096
resident set size (kbytes) (-m) unlimited
socket buffer size (bytes) (-b) 4096
stack size (kbytes) (-s) 10240
threads (-T) not supported
process size (kbytes) (-v) unlimited

[chrisstevens]

Limits are usually set in /etc/security/limits.conf might be worth checking that out?

[Rubberman]

There are the default limits that a user can get access to of system resources. The one resource that causes forking problems the most frequently is the stack size. The default is about 10 megabytes, which can be a problem for large programs. Try increasing that with the command ulimit -s 20480 - that will double it to 20MB, or even a higher number, such as unlimited. Actually, only root can do that, but you can set it to 20480 (I checked). There are global settings that will allow you to exceed that stack size limit if you need.