Bash cannot fork? How odd.

[Kevin O'Gorman]

I have run into a very peculiar thing.  I was monitoring processes on a
Xeon I recently bought, and overnight the monitoring stopped working.  It
was just a Bash script in a loop, running once per minute, and after a
while it stopped functioning normally.  Its last full report was after 342
minutes, and instead of counting the worker processes still running, it
said:

/home/kevin/bin/watch-probes: fork: retry: No child processes
/home/kevin/bin/watch-probes: fork: retry: No child processes
/home/kevin/bin/watch-probes: fork: retry: No child processes
/home/kevin/bin/watch-probes: fork: retry: No child processes
/home/kevin/bin/watch-probes: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

and went quiet.

I've attached the script

I've run a script much like this for days at a time before with no
problem.  There was nothing else active on the machine at the time, except
for the 32 threads running my program "qsearch".  These read a single
output file, and put results in "yes"-files or "no"-files as appropriate.
This is the first time I had the "paste" code in there to make the "yes"
and "no" columns side-by-side, but otherwise it's much like previous
versions.

The monitoring process could not do anything useful, just repeating the
above message, so I killed the monitoring process and started a new one.
The worker processes were still alive and had processed several million
probes in the meantime.

So the question is this: what exactly does that message about child
processes mean?  Had I somehow littered the kernel with zombies?  Is there
something I could have done before killing the monitor?

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman
#define QUESTION ((bb) || (!bb))   /* Shakespeare */

Please consider the environment before printing this email.
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