login errors

[David]

I recently had an issue with one of my rhes4 servers regarding one 
specific account.  This account has alot of cron jobs that kickoff at 
various times, ran as root, which did 'su - oracle -c'.  Early saturday 
morning, the cronjobs started getting the following error:

su: cannot set user id: Resource temporarily unavailable

from the console, if I ran 'su - oracle', the same error popped up.
I believe I have run across this before and the issue was too many process 
for that user.  However, there didn't seem to be that many processes. 
Here is the ulimit -a for that user:

core file size          (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size           (kbytes, -d) unlimited
file size               (blocks, -f) unlimited
pending signals                 (-i) 1024
max locked memory       (kbytes, -l) 3145728
max memory size         (kbytes, -m) unlimited
open files                      (-n) 524288
pipe size            (512 bytes, -p) 8
POSIX message queues     (bytes, -q) 819200
stack size              (kbytes, -s) 65536
cpu time               (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes              (-u) 32768
virtual memory          (kbytes, -v) unlimited
file locks                      (-x) unlimited

'ps -aux | grep oracle' only showed about 125-150 processes running, 
though.  We killed off a bunch of processes, but the problem persisted.  I 
upped the process limit to 106496, still the problem persisted.  After 
about an hour 1/2, it went away.

Anybody have any insight as to what this is about?  The google isn't 
helping too much at this point.

Thanks,
david
-- 
"I find your lack of faith disturbing."
--Darth Vader
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