[chef] Re: What kind of limit am I hitting to?

[Jesse Nelson < >]

Have you tried running the block outside of chef?  The error EAGAIN is a blocking error. Can you try to capture your process count in your actual recipe ? 

This Stackoverflow article hints that it could be something in Mixlib::ShellOut. Probably worth looking  at it. 

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5754753/rubys-process-fork-and-errnoeagain-due-to-batch-forking