I have found this problem many times that the swap space (/tmp space more precisely )of my Server becomes full specially when i run a complete back up of the server .
once the /tmp space is full I am not able to run simple commands as i get error like :
fork no space
on checking df -hk , i could see that /tmp space which is also the swap space becomes full . on checking /tmp directory i could see there was nothing in that , thus i realized that this was due toh the long activity of backup done before and the server is not releasing this space .
In order to release this space i rebooted the system and the /tmp space was empty and probelm was fixed .
Can anybody suggest any other way of releasing the /tmp space ?
The other option is to add some swap space either by adding more raw disk space or else using the swapon(1m) command to make a swapfile in a volume with spare space although that is not as quick as real swapfs swap space.