Comment 12 for bug 89135

Stanislaw - I don't understand your comment about "running out of pids". Do you mean that no further upstart jobs can be started or that no further processes of any type can be started? Can you start a new shell for example or just run "ls"?

Regarding the futex call you see in the strace output, this must relate to some libc call since Upstart doesn't make use of locking directly (and nor does the NIH library it uses). If you can get a strace log with more context, that might give more clues.

However, if you have only seen this issue on a single machine, I'd suggest the problem is with your hardware. Please check it and ensure you run a memory checker like memtest86 on the system to rule out bad memory (which is probably the most likely cause after a bad disk).