excessive "init" forking

[Eric Fielding]

We have a nice new DECstation 3100 running Ultrix 3.0 and DECwindows.
Unfortunately it is running so slowly as to be essentially useless, for
what I believe are three reasons. One it has "only" 8 MB of memory. Two it
has only enough local disk space (100 MB) for the swap partition and must get 
all of its system and files across the Ethernet. Both of these hardware 
deficiencies are being corrected by upgrades. The question I have for the net
is about a software problem. It appears that "/etc/init" is constantly forking
off copies of itself, at a rate of about 50-100 times a minute. Each process
lasts only a short time but meanwhile uses several hundred K of memory. At
any one time "ps -aux" shows 5-10 "/etc/init -a" processes running. It seems
like this constant process creation is greatly magnifying the hardware
deficiencies to the point where the machine is unusable. I suspect that
there is something wrong with the way the system is set up, but I don't know
where to start looking. Thanks for reading this lengthy message.
				++Eric Fielding
Eric at geology.tn.cornell.edu