[asterisk-users] Too many open files: what might cause this?

[Adam Moffett]

I was looking at open files.  lsof | wc -l tells me around 2000 or so.  
The total number goes up and down, but hovers around 2000 and doesn't 
seem to show any upward trend.  I haven't rebooted the system since I 
killed and restarted asterisk, so the first guess would be that asterisk 
is what had all the files open.  I wish I had checked that before I 
killed it.

cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max says 367467 so I guess whatever happened must 
have been pretty extreme.

> So a few people just reported that they couldn't make any calls.  I 
> logged into asterisk and at first everything on the console looked 
> normal, then I got swamped with messages about too many open files.
>
> This is from my asterisk/messages log file:
> [Oct  2 16:46:00] WARNING[19429] rtp.c: Unable to allocate RTCP 
> socket: Too many open files
> [Oct  2 16:46:00] WARNING[19429] udptl.c: Unable to allocate socket: 
> Too many open files
> [Oct  2 16:46:00] WARNING[19429] acl.c: Cannot create socket
> [Oct  2 16:46:00] WARNING[19429] channel.c: Channel allocation failed: 
> Can't create alert pipe! Try increasing max file descriptors with 
> ulimit -n
>
> Messages like that repeat a few dozen times, and then I get this one....
>
> manager.c: Accept returned -1: Too many open files
>
> ...and that repeated tens of thousands of times.  I killed asterisk 
> and restarted it.  Looks normal again.
>
> What the heck just happened?  A bug? Was I attacked? Maybe I'm 
> honestly hitting some system limit and I should bump up max file 
> descriptors like the message says?  We do have a few hundred SIP peers 
> and maybe we'll hit 20-30 simultaneous calls at peak times but I 
> didn't think that was particularly high load.
>
> This is Asterisk 1.4.44.  I know the 1.4 branch is old, but it had 
> been trouble free for years (until now), and I'd have to rewrite some 
> config syntax to upgrade so I didn't see a need to do it.
>
>
>
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