Fork bombing a Linux machine as a non-root user

[Les Mikesell]

On Sat, 2005-03-19 at 07:03, Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> > 
> > Because then we get flooded with "I cant run two copies of openoffice, wtf?",
> > "concurrent users of ftpd downloading iso's or other large files goes bang"
> > and many other similar bugs.
> 
> 
> But shouldn't there be some sane limit already applied? As a normal
> user, I believe having ~300 user proceses would be more than enough? 
> 
> Why not ship it with a reasonable sane limit? 1000 perhaps?

It's your machine - if you want to start 1001 processes your OS
shouldn't try to pretend it is smarter than you and prevent it.

Whether it's actually a good idea or not will depend on your
hardware and what the processes are doing simultaneously, but
again that is not something the person making an OS distribution
can predict.   On the other hand this is something the person
installing the OS might know about and want to limit for
some or all of the users.  If the person who knows about the
hardware and the users can't get it right, it is unreasonable
to expect it from the OS distributer.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com