• Article Type: General
• Product: Aleph
• Product Version: 18.01

Description:
About 1 hour ago, Web OPAC came to a standstill. In the www server log I see:

2008-09-19 11:38:03 84 ----- [err] main: handle_new_request failed
2008-09-19 11:38:03 84 ----- [err] main: handle_new_request failed
<etc.>

grep shows that there are more than 14 million occurrences of this message:

apps-r-18(1) CUN01-ALEPH16>>grep -c handle_new_request www_server_4500.log.1909.1138
14160922

Resolution:
Two sites reported this problem. The temporary solution is to restart the www_server.

We checked the www_server log (with diagnostics in place) at one site which was getting this problem repeatedly. The error that we get from the “accept” function is

“[errno 24] Too many open files”.

This means that the number of file descriptors defined for the process is not enough. We checked this number by using the “limit” command.

aleph@libtstdb(a20_2):~/a20_2/alephm>limit descriptors
descriptors 256

We believe that increasing the value of this parameter could solve the problem.

This can be done by changing the system value of this parameter:

limit descriptors 4096

[The preceding corrected the problem and prevented the error messages.]

Note: in version 20 we have been setting "limit descriptors" to 32767.

• Article last edited: 10/8/2013