zone ipc ports exhausted

[Marcus Brinkmann]

Hi,

today, I chose a medium load instead heavy load.  That means, continuous
compilation, but small packages, so that less time is spent in configure and
make, but more in mail reading, downloading, web page generation, etc.

After about 6-7 hours (normal uptime under heave load is 4-5 hours), the system
crashed, but surprisingly neither in proc nor in thread code.  It was simply a

panic: zalloc: zone ipc ports exhausted

As far as I udnerstand that means that a new port should have been created,
but the memory area reserved for ports is full.  I don't have the numbers near
me, but I remember that Neal told me he saw a lot of these, and he has a
powerful machine, too.

So, either we have a port leak (dammit! I didn't check the port nrs in ps),
or we just have a larger number ofp orts in the system than Mach makes space
for.

I will try to monitor the number of ports to verify or falsify the port leak
case.  If the latter turns out to be the case, two questions arise:

1. Should we increase the zone size?
2. Why isn't it grown dynamically?

Thanks,
Marcus