cpp: vfork: Resource temporarily unavailable

Question

I have a weird issue I have just got with C++.

While I am compiling my program, I am getting this:

cpp: vfork: Resource temporarily unavailable

It is in SCO, but I am not sure if it is only a SCO thing or maybe it is to do with all Linux Systems.

I have had a look on several sites, and they say it could be that "basically g++ is trying to create (fork) a new process, and the kernel is saying No" - Touchtecservers answer

I asked this question in U&L chat, and they said to ask it here.

Edit

I have tried adding:

#define vfork fork

To the source file, and that didn't work.

Answer 1

The error message is from the compiler itself, not directly anything to do with the source code in the program you are compiling. Indeed, because the compiler has been unable to launch the cpp process, your source code has (probably) not been looked at yet. It's slightly unusual that it is cpp that is reported as the process name; I'd expect it to be the cc compiler driver that launched cpp (so it would normally report cc: vfork: Resource temporarily unavailable).

Basically, the machine is trying to do too much and doesn't have the resources left over to fork a new process. If you're running a make -j8 to do parallel compilations, maybe you should reduce the 8 to 4. Otherwise, look at what else is going on the machine that you can stop.