Fixing mac os yosemite issue "bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable"

fixup.txt

# see the current limits
$ sysctl -a | grep maxproc

# increase it
$ sudo sysctl -w kern.maxproc=xxxx
$ sudo sysctl -w kern.maxprocperuid=xxx

# run at startup
$ sudo vim /etc/sysctl.conf

kern.maxproc=xxxx
kern.maxprocperuid=xxxx

$ sudo launchctl limit
$ sudo launchctl limit maxproc <maxprocperuid> <maxproc>
$ sudo launchctl limit maxfiles 512 unlimited

# run at startup
$ sudo vim /etc/launchd.conf

limit maxproc <maxprocperuid> <maxproc>
limit maxfiles 512 unlimited

Thank you for this! What are the maximum values that can be set for maxproc and maxprocperuid?

I'm getting this issue right now on 10.12.6 and im on one of the newer and faster mac pros. It seems a little unbelieveable that im hitting this limit. I have firefox with 20 or more tabs and then say 10 other applications open but on my old mac I never hit this limit. I'm following the guide listed here, but could there ever be any issues to the mac if you double your process count i.e could it burn out the process or drain battery massively?

A limit of 1064 processes on a 16 GB 8-core i7 Macbook is extremely low - I couldn't believe it when I first hit this "Cannot fork" issue.

from man 8 sysctl:

 The -w option has been deprecated and is silently ignored.

I also needed sudo sysctl kern.tty.ptmx_max=255 (or 511, or whatever). My default (in El Capitan) was 127. (As a tmux user, I need more than that.)