Introduction
Effective in
Some applications may have been coded with builtin assumptions that the number of processes and the value of PIDs/PGIDs/SIDs cannot exceed 30,000 – the maximum imposed by prior versions of
Terminology
11i v3
This refers to version 3 of
active processes
Total number of processes that exist simultaneously and that can be found in a list of processes produced by the ps(1) command. This includes defunct (zombie) processes that have not yet been waited upon by their parent process (with a function such as wait(2)).
CHILD_MAX, _SC_CHILD_MAX
The CHILD_MAX system variable, obtainable via the function sysconf(_SC_CHILD_MAX) or the command getconf CHILD_MAX, is the same value as that of the maxuprc system tunable parameter.
MAXPID, PID_MAX
MAXPID and PID_MAX specify the maximum value for a process identifier (PID). In past releases their value was 30,000 (before 11i v1) and 8,388,607 (11i v1, v2). In 11i v3 the value is 1,073,741,823.
maxuprc
This is the system tunable parameter that specifies the upper limit on the number of active processes associated with a single user ID. It represents the maximum
NPROC
This is the system tunable parameter that specifies the upper limit on the number of active processes. The maximum value on OS versions prior to
1Such assumptions violate the interface specification of
3