Text: table is full

[dave at murphy.UUCP]

Summary: having lots of sticky-bit programs can eat up text table
Line eater: enabled

One other thing that you might want to check for is to see if someone has
turned on the sticky bit on a lot of utilities on your machines.  The
sticky bit causes the program's text to remain in the page/swap space
after it exits, so that when it is run again, it starts up faster.
A side effect of this is that the program *permanantly* occupies a text
table entry (until reboot).  If you have a lot of things with the sticky
bit turned on, they could be using up a lot of text table entries.

You can spot stickys by looking at the program's permissions; if the last
letter of the perm string is 't' instead of 'x', the sticky bit is set.
For example:

-rwxr-xr-t  6 root       139264 Jan 29  1986 /usr/ucb/vi

You can un-sticky a program by doing "chmod -t" on it, then running it to
flush out the copy remaining in the page area.  Alternately, if it's
something you don't want to run indiscriminately, you can do the chmod and 
then reboot.

As far as I'm aware, the only thing that comes in the Sun distribution with
the sticky bit set is "vi", so that shouldn't be a problem.  There was
some discussion in this group a couple of months ago about this topic, and
the general consensus was that, for paged systems, you don't need to use
this feature very much.  So, if you have someone who is going around setting
the sticky bit on everything, stop them.  (Setting the sticky bit requires
root access.)

---
"I used to be able to sing the blues, but now I have too much money."
-- Bruce Dickinson

Dave Cornutt, Gould Computer Systems, Ft. Lauderdale, FL
UUCP:  ...!{sun,pur-ee,brl-bmd,bcopen}!gould!dcornutt
 or ...!{ucf-cs,allegra,codas}!novavax!houligan!dcornutt
ARPA: dcornutt at gswd-vms.arpa (I'm not sure how well this works)

"The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of my employer,
not necessarily mine, and probably not necessary."