[avahi] accept(): Too many open files

[Trent Lloyd]

Hi Mark,

Mark Edwards wrote:
> On Mar 20, 2008, at 10:48 AM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
>
>   
>> On Thu, 20.03.08 02:56, Mark Edwards (mark at antsclimbtree.com) wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> Running Avahi 0.6.16 on Debian 4.0.  I get a series of messages like
>>> the following each morning in the logs, like the following:
>>>
>>> Mar 18 04:00:07 sqwubbsy avahi-daemon[6062]: accept(): Too many open
>>> files
>>> Mar 18 04:00:08 sqwubbsy avahi-daemon[6062]: accept(): Too many open
>>> files
>>> Mar 18 04:00:11 sqwubbsy avahi-daemon[6062]: accept(): Too many open
>>> files
>>>
>>> This happens at the same time, 4am.  It coincides with a set of
>>> webmin cron jobs that presumably cause some kind of open file
>>> exhaustion, similar to the following bug report:
>>>
>>> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=461181
>>>
>>> I have tried doubling my /proc/sys/fs/file-max from the default of
>>> 99196 to 198392, and it seems to have no effect.
>>>
>>> Can anyone here suggest something?  Thanks.
>>>       
>> Explore /proc/$(pidof avahi-daemon)/fd/ and find out to what file or
>> other fd type all those open fds actually refer to.
>>
>> Histroic versions of Avahi didn't close all open fds on startup. So it
>> maybe some program is leaking fds when starting Avahi? I remember some
>> initng users having a problem like that with initng leaking fds like
>> stupid or something like it.
>>     
>
> I don't see a huge amount of files in /proc/$(pidof avahi-daemon)/fd/
>
> I get a list like this:
>
> lr-x------ 1 root root 64 2008-03-20 22:49 0 -> /dev/null
> l-wx------ 1 root root 64 2008-03-20 22:49 1 -> /dev/null
> l-wx------ 1 root root 64 2008-03-20 22:49 10 -> pipe:[1192423]
> lrwx------ 1 root root 64 2008-03-20 22:49 11 -> socket:[1192424]
> lrwx------ 1 root root 64 2008-03-20 22:49 12 -> socket:[1192426]
> lrwx------ 1 root root 64 2008-03-20 22:49 13 -> socket:[1192428]
> lrwx------ 1 root root 64 2008-03-20 22:49 14 -> socket:[1192429]
> lrwx------ 1 root root 64 2008-03-20 22:49 15 -> socket:[1192430]
> l-wx------ 1 root root 64 2008-03-20 22:49 2 -> /dev/null
> lrwx------ 1 root root 64 2008-03-20 22:49 5 -> socket:[1192418]
> lrwx------ 1 root root 64 2008-03-20 22:49 6 -> socket:[1192420]
> lr-x------ 1 root root 64 2008-03-20 22:49 7 -> pipe:[1192422]
> l-wx------ 1 root root 64 2008-03-20 22:49 8 -> pipe:[1192422]
> lr-x------ 1 root root 64 2008-03-20 22:49 9 -> pipe:[1192423]
>
> I'm kind of at a loss as to what I'm looking for here.  Again, this  
> is only happening at 4:00am each day, and the only thing I can see  
> happening in particular at that point is a bunch of cron jobs  
> occurring at the same time.
>
>   
This is not a problem with Avahi I suspect but you are just seeing a 
symptom of it.

Try this command

 shell> lsof -n

When it is happening, you'll probably notice some programming holding a 
lot of FDs open.


Regards,
Trent