title: fork failures: Cannot allocate memory
body: <p>I have a program running on a linux machine. It forks a process to send a mail and often logs fork failure messages stating that it could not allocate memory.</p>
  
  <p>When I check the size of resident memory it comes around 12Gb (swap is configured to be only 1Gb on this machine).</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way I can be sure that this huge chunk of memory is not a leak but just memory growth?</p>
  
  <p>Also, Is there a system limit that can be tweaked so that I don't get any fork failures?</p>