Resource temporarily unavailable

Cause

This error indicates that the fork(2) system call failed because the system's process table is full, or that a system call failed because of insufficient memory or swap space. Also, a user might not be allowed to create more processes.

Action

Simply waiting often gives the system time to free resources. However, if this message occurs often on a system, reconfigure the kernel and allow more processes. To increase the size of the process table, increase the value of MAXUSERS in the /etc/system file. The default MAXUSERS value is the amount of main memory in Mbytes, minus 2.

If one user is not allowed to create any more processes, that user has probably exceeded the memory size limit; see the limit(1) man page for details.

Technical Notes

The symbolic name for this error is EAGAIN, errno=11.