[adobriyan]

> Increasing the max setting does not consume additional resources. It merely makes it possible for applications to get the resources they ask for.

From unswappable kernel memory, yeah.

> kernel.pid_max = 999999

> * - nproc unlimited

1.000.000 pids is 1 mil task_struct's.

On my quite stripped out kernel 14 task_struct's fit into order 3 slab -- 14 objects per 32KB or kernel memory.

1000000 / 14 * 32 * 1024 = 2.18 GB of kernel memory

and that's not even counting other kernel structures!