Re: Thousands of errors...what happened?

On Mar 24, 2014, at 9:43 AM, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:

> Jerry Levan wrote:
>> The other day I attempted to connect to my 9.3.2 postgresql data base and my connection
>> attempts kept failing.
>>
>> I found about 100000 lines in the log file that looked like:
>>
>> ERROR: could not seek to end of file "global/12292": Too many open files
>> LOG: out of file descriptors: Too many open files; release and retry
>
> I think this means there is a file descriptor leak somewhere; maybe a
> third-party module by Apple. It might be useful to see what files are
> open by the offending process; in Linux you would just see
> ls -l /proc/{pid}/fd
> but I don't know if this works on Mac OS X.

% sudo lsof

is the tool. It doesn't have to be a leak; if you've ignored the postgres configuration, you could have a potential max clients that exceeds the standard open file limit of the system, which you may have just been lucky in never reaching until a surge in traffic generated enough postgres children to breach the limit. Adjust open file limits for launchd-based agents through /etc/launchd.conf:

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=launchd.conf+open+files

~ john