From owner-freebsd-questions  Sat Oct 21 14:22:42 2000
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Subject: Too many open files in system
From: Arcady Genkin <antipode@thpoon.com>
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Date: 21 Oct 2000 17:22:38 -0400
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Today I got quite a scare.  At 16:50 I couldn't do almost anything,
getting an error message about too many open files in system.  At
about 17:00 all came back to normal.  I did `lsof' then, and it
reported 913 open files, about a third of them belonging to
apache/postgresql.  After restart of apache, the number went down to
730.

The system log contains:

,----
| Oct 21 16:50:26 soup syslogd: /dev/console: Too many open files in \
|                                      system: Too many open files in system
| Oct 21 16:50:26 soup syslogd: /var/run/utmp: Too many open files in system
| Oct 21 16:50:26 soup syslogd: /var/run/utmp: Too many open files in system
| Oct 21 16:50:26 soup /kernel: file: table is full
`----

What could have caused this?  The box runs 4.1-S, and the main
services are apache/mod_php4, postgresql, and a UW IMAP server
(private: not a busy one).  No X.

Could this have been an external attack?

If there is a limit on the number of open files somewhere in the
kernel, is it raisable?

Many thanks,
-- 
Arcady Genkin
Don't read everything you believe.


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