make.err:make[1]: vfork: Resource temporarily unavailable

[Michael Muratet]

Greetings

I am using a data processing application that uses make for its  
implementation. The application is a set of python scripts that write  
out Makefiles and the user launches the analysis by typing make -j n  
target. I suspect the authors were looking for a cheap way to get  
parallelization. The make takes many hours to run in most cases,  
executing a variety of c methods and scripts. My problem comes about  
when make tries to launch a new thread:

make.err:make[1]: vfork: Resource temporarily unavailable

I suspect that the resource it wants is swap space, I can see that it  
occasionally fills up and I am working on fixing that. But failing  
that, is there a way to get make to tell me what it lacks?

I am on a Penguin Computing scyld cluster with Relion 1702 compute  
nodes, kernel=

Linux scyld.localdomain 2.6.18-128.1.1.el5.530g0000 #1 SMP Tue Mar 17  
21:49:24 EDT 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

and the latest Centos linux.

Thanks

Mike