Hm? Though on Linux I'm sure it varies from distro to distro, my Fedora 10 box has ulimit -u at 1024, and my OSX 10.6 install has it at 266 (2^8 + 10? Wonder how they decided on that number).

(And yes, I tried forkbombing them for the hell of it, both systems took it entirely in stride, as would be expected.)

Does anyone know of any current distros that don't set a sensible process limit in the default install?