On Thursday, Feb 27, 2003, at 14:53 US/Pacific, Peter Dyballa wrote: Hello! I remember that in old BSD based SunOS 4.x there was a way to set kernel variables at runtime using adb. I do remember that once I had to enlarge something like NPROC, the system-wide no. of processes. In Mac OS X we have sysctl, IMHO a modern and easy to use tool to achieve the same. And: "sysctl -a" shows: kern.maxproc = 532 After reading the man page ("man 8 sysctl") I tried: pete 156 /\ sysctl -w kern.maxproc=999 kern.maxproc: Operation not permitted pete 157 /\ sudo sysctl -w kern.maxproc=999 Password: kern.maxproc: 532 -> 999 pete 158 /\ sysctl -a | grep proc kern.maxproc = 999 pete 159 /\ But it does succeed to raise the shell's maxproc value above 100! Do I have to reboot? Logging out and in did not change anything ... You apparently missed this minor point in the 'sysctl' man page: To set the maximum number of processes allowed in the system to 1000, one would use the follow request: sysctl -w kern.maxproc=1000 Note that 'maxproc' does not affect the maximum per-user process count. Check back in the archives for further discussion in this thread, and the answer to your question. Regards, Justin -- Justin C. Walker, Curmudgeon-At-Large * Institute for General Semantics | When LuteFisk is outlawed | Only outlaws will have | LuteFisk *--------------------------------------*-------------------------------* _______________________________________________ darwin-kernel mailing list | darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/darwin-kernel Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.