Bash processes keep appearing and using up all system resources

[jimmy0984]

I've got centos 5 installed on a research machine here at work, built a p5b, 6400 and 2gb ram. It's been working well for a month and then over the last 2 weeks its been dying every night and the logs say memory dumps seem to be the problem. Looking at the processes, i've got about 40 instances of bash running all using 2% of the cpu and around 40mb of memory, and more keep generating until all system resources are maxed out.

Can anyone help with this?

Thanks

Jim

[foxb]

what those bash processes are diong? Who is the owner?

Have you concidered HW failure, hack .... etc?

[toracat]

Any idea what/who is starting those processes? Tried lsof ?
ulimit might help you limit those processes, but you should find out the cause first.

Akemi