From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Aug 24 21:16: 1 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from nisser.com (n2000039.telekabel.chello.nl [212.187.0.39]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4149D15201 for ; Tue, 24 Aug 1999 21:14:48 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from roelof@nisser.com) Received: from nisser.com (roelof [10.0.0.2]) by nisser.com (8.9.3/8.9.2) with ESMTP id EAA73450 for ; Wed, 25 Aug 1999 04:42:02 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from roelof@nisser.com) Message-ID: <37C357F5.CA7FC470@nisser.com> Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 04:41:57 +0200 From: Roelof Osinga Organization: eboa - engineering buro Office Automation X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.6 [en] (WinNT; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Did I lose mail? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I was toying aroud with windowmanagers and VNC when it happenned... The system ran out of file handles. Symptoms of this grave illness were: too many open files in system nisser: kernel: file : table is full As well as several other assorted complaints among which where panicy messages from sendmail. Which of course makes me wonder whether I did lose any mail or did it yet manage to convey the imminent failure to the other party? Also the params of my basically stock and just CVSupped 3.2 system are: nisser:/$ sysctl -a | grep files kern.maxfiles: 360 kern.maxfilesperproc: 360 p1003_1b.mapped_files: 0 nisser:/$ Now the 360 files per process looks reasonable to me, but 360 files systemwide? No way. This occurred with just 3 users active (plus two VNC sessions, make it 5) most tunning KDE. Not really an excessive load as far as Unix systems go, I would say. Yet clearly enough to exhaust the max. file handle kernel space. The system of course runs sendmail, apache, ircd, whatever, though in a very modest way. The question now becomes what is the best way to up the limit? I could give "sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=3600" to set it to a somewhat more egrecious value, though not generous by far. Would it survive, say, a reboot? What are my other options? Are there more of these kind of gotchas? I mean, I can look at the output of sysctl -a, but that doesn't necessarily mean I grock it. Sure, I could dive into my stack of old Dr. Dobbsen but ... well, whose to say I'ld grock that? Roelof -- Home is where the (@) http://eboa.com/ is. Telekabel home http://nisser.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message