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85

Too many open files - how to find the culprit

rated 0 times [ 85] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 248605 / 3 Years ago, fri, may 7, 2021, 3:31:38

When running tail -f filename, I got the following message:

tail: inotify cannot be used, reverting to polling: Too many open files

Is that a potential problem?

How do I diagnose what's responsible for all the open files? I have a list of suspect processes, but if they don't turn out to be the culprits, instructions that don't rely on knowing which process to check would be useful.

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fertion

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1 Year ago

answered 3 Years ago itteast · Accepted Answer

You can use lsof to understand who's opening so many files. Usually it's a (web)server that opens so many files, but lsof will surely help you identify the cause.

Once you understand who's the bad guy you can

kill the process/stop the program

raise the ulimit

If output from lsof is quite huge try redirecting it to a file and then open the file

Example (you might have to Ctrl+C the first command)

lsof > ~/Desktop/lsof.log

cat ~/Desktop/lsof.log | awk '{ print $2 " " $1; }' | sort -rn | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20

vim ~/Desktop/lsof.log