process limits

[David]

Does anyone know of an accurate way to get the number of processes that a 
user is running?  'ps' doesnt seem up to the task.

The reason I ask is because I was woken up at 3am the other day due to one 
of our oracle servers freaking out.  Apparently, it had hit the soft limit 
on the  number of processes it was allowed.  ulimit -u shows 2048 
(previously).  ps -aux | grep oracle only shows about 150 or so, though. 
Changing the nproc soft limit to 4096 fixed the issue (done in 
/etc/security/limits.conf).

So, are there hidden processes that ps wont show?  I've traversed the 
/proc/sys directories and have still come up blank.

thanks,
david

-- 
"I find your lack of faith disturbing."
--Darth Vader
---
  11:39:01 up 1 day, 21:43,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00