Thousands of open file descriptors after update to Kubuntu 12.10

[Guest]

Hi,

I have some serious problems after upgrading my system from Kubuntu 12.04 to 12.10. There are thousands of open file descriptors which results in terrible performance.
Currently I have Firefox and a terminal running and 'lsof | wc -l' lists 27624 open file descriptors. After starting my Eclipse IDE and a JBoss application server this increases to over 200000. Before updating to 12.10 I had at maximum about 12000 open file descriptors.

Has anyone else experienced the same issues? Have you found a fix?

[bailout]

I have no idea what they or what the significance is but I ran your command and I have 14,209 of them with just Opera and konsole open.

[james147]

I have 40829 open right now ^^, though I don't see why they would be a major bottle neck. What are your other resource like? Ram, cpu, disk io, disk usage?

[dibl]

I (i.e. google) can't find any online information suggesting that the number of file descriptors has significant impact on Linux performance. On the other hand, video drivers are huge, window managers can be pretty huge, memory availability is big, and other things like vm.swappiness are signficant factors. So, check your video performance and such things as your desktop effects settings first, as those are most likely where the main contributor(s) of slow performance can be found.

Also, and especially on a new installation, the nepomuk strigi indexing can suck the life out of performance, so if you don't need the "semantic desktop" you can turn those services off and perhaps see a difference.

FYI, on a very fast debian KDE system, the applicable file descriptor information is like this:

don@imerabox:~$ cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max
609506
don@imerabox:~$ lsof | wc -l
51320

[Guest]

Since I detected this problem I have the following running on a konsole window:

watch -n 10 cat /proc/sys/fs/file-nr

When I just login the first column lingers around 6000 ... depending on what else I run and what the particular package is doing it starts to increase slowly up to the point where the system runs out of handles and completely locks me out. As it gets into the 200K open handles range, the system becomes pretty sluggish. Login out and back in brings it back to the 6000 range. lsof line count doesn't come close to the file-nr count, so I don't trust it to find out what's leaking the open handles.

Different scenarios when the counter runs away:
amarok: when scanning for media to build the catalog.
SpiderOak: when scanning a new folder to backup.
While these 2 packages are working in regular mode it doesn't look like the handles run away.

Freeciv: "open handles" run away while the game progresses, quitting the app doesn't close them all.

None of this happens on 2 other machine running Kubuntu 12.04.

Another solution that was suggested to me was to stop plasma-desktop and restart it, but it doesn't seem to close all of them.