Pernicious problem with vfork / qmail / qmail-scanner (more)

Justin Baugh justin.baugh at corp.request.com
Fri Mar 12 17:59:00 PST 2004


I did some testing. I wrote a small program in C to fork off a 
specified number of processes and leave them there. I find that 
I can run exactly 39 processes as qmaild before tcpserver begins 
to barf, saying it cannot fork.

This makes no sense to me; I can fork off hundreds of processes 
as the qmaild user with my simple test program (running as 
sudo -U qmaild). However, tcpserver, no matter what I do, is 
locked to 40 total children processes.

I find that value very interesting because during my research 
I noticed that there is a #define in sys/syslimits.h defining 
CHILD_MAX as 40 if it is not already defined. And it seems
as though you can set it as a kernel option in 4.x but not in
5.x....Could this be related? I'm confused because it doesn't 
look like tcpserver relies on syslimits or anything which 
would get that limit...any ideas?

Thanks,

-Justin
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