file system growing with open files

[Lowell Filak]

The following message was sent by Agneta Schick
<schick at SDAC.HANNOVER.BGR.DE> on Fri, 25 Feb 2005 10:52:42 +0100.

> Hello,
>
> We have a system problem on a machine with a mapserver application:
"too many
> open files"
> A list of open files shows it is always the same file: the source file
for a
> reference map (.png) which is in read mode and never closed.
> This could be a version problem because we have a similar application on
> another machine with no such problems.
>
> We run
> MapServer version 4.2.3 OUTPUT=PNG OUTPUT=JPEG OUTPUT=WBMP SUPPORTS=PROJ
> SUPPORTS=FREETYPE INPUT=TIFF INPUT=EPPL7 INPUT=OGR INPUT=GDAL
INPUT=SHAPEFILE
>  with mapscript
>  perl 5.8.3
>  mod_perl-1.29
>  apache_1.3.27
>  on Solaris 9.
>
> We have set rlim_fd_cur=1024 and rlim_fd_max=4096 to no avail.
>
>
> On the machine without this problem we run
> MapServer version 3.6.5 OUTPUT=PNG OUTPUT=JPEG OUTPUT=WBMP SUPPORTS=PROJ
> SUPPORTS=TTF INPUT=TIFF INPUT=EPPL7 INPUT=JPEG INPUT=OGR INPUT=GDAL
> INPUT=SHAPEFILE
>  with mapscript
>  perl 5.6.1
>  mod_perl-1.27
>  apache_1.3.22
>  on Solaris 8.

Agneta,

A couple of thoughts.
Are you sure the files are just being left open or are there a load of
open connections (sockets) to the webserver itself that the processes
are waiting on to finish?
My understanding as of the 4.2+ series of MS is that Perl's garbage
collection will close things when a cgi finishes but when running under
mod_perl you probably need to explicitly undef the map object to trigger
the cleanup.?
I also noticed that the default max number of files per user is lower in
solaris 9 then in solaris 8.

Lowell