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I have a problem where my application is crashing saying that there are too many open files. running lsof | wc -l it says that there are 3447067 open file descriptors however I can't find out what is using that many file descriptors.

I ran cat /etc/passwd to find all users on the system followed by lsof -u <user> | wc -l for all those users, but I didn't even come near the amount of used descriptors.

Is there any reasonable way of determining what is using up so many file descriptors?

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  • What are the active ulimit settings for the user running the program? Check with ulimit -a. – Kusalananda♦ Oct 9 '17 at 8:43
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for dir in /proc/[1-9]*/fd; do
    echo "$dir"
    cd "$dir" &>/dev/null || continue
    set -- *
    echo $#
    echo
done

This is the output of lsof. I do not know why it differs.

lsof -F p | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
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  • I just tried that and I get a few that are around 100, and maybe one or two that are at 1000, but all in all there is not even close to the 3447076 that i get from lsof | wc -l – munHunger Oct 9 '17 at 7:48
  • @munHunger Did you run that code as root? Maybe there are resources which are counted as file descriptors but not shown in /proc/$PID/fd. Sockets maybe. A different approach would be to count the entries per PID in the lsof output. But I don't have the time to do that right now. – Hauke Laging Oct 9 '17 at 7:54
  • Yes I did run it as root. I thought that sockets counted as normal file descriptors, but if not, where would they be listed(if at all)? – munHunger Oct 9 '17 at 7:56
  • @munHunger See my edit. – Hauke Laging Oct 9 '17 at 20:49

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