Nasty fork() bomb

From: Sudheer (sudheerreddy.p_at_gmail.com)
Date: 02/07/05 

Date: 7 Feb 2005 06:34:06 -0800

Hello Everyone,

         I have a program which forks for 5 times. Its children fork 5
times. These children fork five times.... This is done 10 times. The
10th generation just exit. This causes about 5^10 + 5^9 + 5^8 + ... +
5 forks.

          After this the machine freezes for about 30 mins and then
comes to normal state. Conceptually, fork() after creating huge no of
child, fails with ENOMEM/EAGAIN. But even after exiting the machine is
taking long time to come to normal state. Why is this happening? how
can we avoid?

           I am new to unix system progamming! Help me out.

Thanks

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