pthread_create: cannot allocate memory

[Giovanni P. Tirloni]

Hi,

  I coded a small echo server that creates a thread for every connection 
it accepts. It works fine and then I decided to test how many threads it 
could handle so I coded a stress.c client program that'd just create as 
many connections as I asked without exchanging any data.

  First I discovered the kern.threads.max_thread_per_proc limit that was 
limiting it to 1500 threads. So I raised it and the max_group_per_proc 
to 10k.

  I also increased the NMBCLUSTERS limit to 65535 just in case.

  What I've seen is that the server stops at 2400-2410 threads when I 
ask strees.c to create 8k connections. top shows I still have 150MB of 
free memory.

  Where should I look to raise this limit ? This is a CeleronM 1.3GHz 
and 512MB of RAM.

  Another behavior was that it creates 130 threads at once, waits, then 
another 130 more. It varies 1-10 threads sometimes but usually this 
inverval is constant. I think it might have something to do with the TCP 
code doing some normal limitation but I've look at it.

Thanks,

-- 
Giovanni P. Tirloni / gpt at tirloni.org