"resource temporarily unavailable" on the Mac

So if you are a power user you might hit resource limits on the Mac just like the old UNIX times.

So today I was unable to create new process on my Mac:

sh-3.2$ sh

sh-3.2$ sh

sh: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

sh-3.2$ exit

sh-3.2$ ps ux|wc

sh: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

So I killed a few process and ran ps and pipe it to wc:

sh-3.2$ exit

sh-3.2$ exit

sh-3.2$ ps ux|wc -l

266

266 processes isn't a huge number in today's standards right?

Guess Apple has a different view - 266 is a pre-defined limit of the maximum number of processes a single user (uid) can create on the Mac:

sh-3.2$ sudo sysctl -a |grep maxprocperuid

kern.exec: unknown type returned

kern.maxprocperuid = 266

kern.maxprocperuid: 266

Solution? Simple pump it up by:

$ sudo sysctl -w kern.maxprocperuid = 512