Too many open file in 2.2 (Re: Exploding number of cyrus processes)

[Sergey Mukhin]

>>>>> "F" == Freerk J Bosscha <f.j.bosscha at nhl.nl> writes:
F> Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 21:04:33 +0100
F> To: info-cyrus at lists.andrew.cmu.edu

F> I notice the following problem on my mail-system:

F> When the system load increases, once in a while, the number of tls
F> sessions explode (up to 2500 processes) and no user is connected to it.
F> During this, the system slows down and the only thing I can do is stop
F> and start the cyrus daemons.

F> Has anyone else noticed the same problem

F> If you need additional info, please ask


I have noticed not same but similar phenomena.

I am running cyrus-2.2 ( alfa or even pre-alfa )
plus MySQL modules plus Sendmail 8.12.5 on
FreeBSD 4.6.1-RELEASE-p10 and occasionally the
following errors in logs happen:

Dec 19 17:01:31 horse pop3[5033]: IOERROR: opening /var/spool/imap/domain/wm.west-call.com/user^multikom/cyrus.cache: Too many open files

It keeps going that way for a few minutes and then
comes back to normal operation.

The whole system's load in general is not big;
max. processor usage is about 25%.

The impression is -- sometimes cyrus or some its routine
starts to consume lots of file descriptors.

I used lsof for checking open files when the error
took place and saw lots of files opened by pop3d.
The exact lsof output seems to me too large to post
here; you can see it at   http://sm.msk.ru/cyrus-lsof.txt
For security reasons I have omitted:
 - files opened by mysql -- 136 entries
 - files contained /lib/ -- 430 entries
 - files opened by miscellaneous programs --  192 entries total


Honestly, I always feel a bit nervous running such
kind of software as my programmer's experience tells
me: it must be a bug!

Could anybody please help me to fix that ?

Below are some kernel parameters which I believe are
related to max. open files. Their values seem to me be
adequate for my situation -- please correct if I am
wrong.


kern.maxvnodes: 40204
kern.maxproc: 8212
kern.maxfiles: 24636
kern.maxfilesperproc: 14781
kern.maxprocperuid: 7390
kern.ipc.maxsockets: 16424
kern.openfiles: 1732
kern.maxusers: 512
user.stream_max: 20
user.tzname_max: 255


I would be glad to give more information if necessary
as well as trace/debug the code here.


Thanks,


--
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    Sergey Mukhin                       |
    Head of Internet department         |    http://sm.msk.ru/
    WestCall LTD, Moscow, Russia        |    SM45-RIPE
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*     If you can't learn do it well learn to enjoy doing it badly.     *
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