Linux Process Management Concepts

Internal

• Linux

Maximum Number of Processes Allowed on the System

cat /proc/sys/kernel/pid_max

or

sysctl kernel.pid_max

For more details, see sysctl.

Maximum Number of Processes Available to a Single User

The current value can be read and set with ulimit -u.

For Java applications, this setting limits the number of threads a JVM can create, and it can cause the JVM to throw OutOfMemoryError exceptions when that limit is reached. For more details see

Java Threads and Linux Processes