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

[Paul Smith]

On Thu, 2009-07-23 at 15:51 -0400, Mike Shal wrote:
> On 7/23/09, Michael Muratet <address@hidden> wrote:
> > 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 don't think there is a way to get make to give you this information,
> since make doesn't get any more specific info from the kernel.

Mike is correct: this is all that make knows so it can't tell you more.

But you might have more success looking at your system log files: often
the kernel itself will log something when this happens and typically
systems are set up (via klogd) to forward these message to syslog.  You
can also run "dmesg" to see the last N lines of logging, if you don't
wait too long after it happens.