Simple fork bomb?

1. were your limits rationally set? As in sized for your system. My limit is 4095 (though I REALLY shouldn't do that...)

2. Was your memory limits properly sized? This tends to limit the effect of some fork bombs (fork/exec type) since the memory allocated is shared (copy on write) in a simple fork attack.

3. Do you have a CPU usage limit? This slows some fork bombs by aborting them after the CPU limit is reached.

Once your resource limits are reached, of course you (as the user) shouldn't be able to start more.

You might see if you can login as root... or a different user (which would get a different limit, with a new resource allocation).

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