Bug#628724: chromium: Browser prevents urther creation of processes

[Nicholas Bamber]

On 31/05/11 19:21, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> Hi Nicolas,
> 
> Nicholas Bamber wrote:
> 
>> When I run "chromium http://www.israelnationalnews.com" I get the
>> message "The following plugin has crashed: Shockwave Flash" in
>> chromium itself.
>>
>> Trying to launch a new xterm gives the error:
>> "Could not launch 'Terminal' \n Failed to fork (Resource temporarily
>> unavailable)".
>>
>> Trying to run "free" in an existing terminal gives: "Failed to fork
>> (Resource temporarily unavailable)".
>>
>> As soon as I close chromium it returns to normal. 
> 
> Looking at fork(2), it seems that this can happen due to low-memory
> conditions or the "ulimit -u" (ULIMIT_NPROC) limit.

My bug report includes the output of free so I think you can form your
own judgement about that. I will discuss the hardware situation when my
hardware expert gets back from holiday.

> 
> Is memory tight?  Do you have a large number of processes open? 

Pretty much the minimum number of processes I can get away with.

 What
> version of the Flash plugin do you use?  Is it possible to reproduce
> this with the Flash plugin disabled (for example, using gnash in place
> of flash)?

I don't appear to have any flash plugin installed. The chromium install
was a completely fresh install.

> Ah, another idea: can you see a lot of zombie processes if you run
> "top" before this happens?  (Using the 'u' command can restrict the
> list to programs running as you, using 'R' can show inactive processes
> at the top of the list, and 'c' shows the full command lines.)

Trickier than you make it sound since once it has happened I cannot
start "top". I tried starting top and then chromium but then chromium
did a segmentation fault.

> 
> Thanks for reporting,
> Jonathan


-- 
Nicholas Bamber | http://www.periapt.co.uk/
PGP key 3BFFE73C from pgp.mit.edu

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