X11: Maximum number of clients reached

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2009-05-26 at 12:51 +0100, Bill Crawford wrote:
> Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > On Sat, 2009-05-23 at 13:53 +0200, Mildred Ki'Lya wrote:
> >> On 05/18/2009 06:34 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: 
> >>> On Mon, 2009-05-18 at 09:26 -0400, Adam Jackson wrote:
> >>>> Check the output of 'sudo lsof -p `pidof Xorg`' when this happens.  This
> >>>> will show you what file descriptors are in use by the X server.  Last I
> >>>> checked this error message was misleading, and could mean either "I've
> >>>> hit the client limit" or "I've run out of file descriptors".
> >>>>     
> >>> That would be:
> >>>
> >>> su -c lsof -p `pidof X`
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> So, it happened again. There are 234 opened sockets, and the last file
> >> descriptor seems to be 255u, so perhaps there is a limit there. Any
> >> ideas on how to find the program responsible for that?
> > 
> > The 'u' just means the file is opened read/write. The actual fd number
> > is 255, which is certainly suspicious. Just for kicks, try 'ulimit -n'
> > to see if your open file limit is set too low for some odd reason.
> 
> It's not that suspicious :o) look for XFD_SETSIZE and MAXCLIENTS in the 
> X server source code. It's still a hardcoded limit in the server.

Well on my system the above incantation gives over 1200 open files, and
I'm assuming we're all using the same X server since it's F11-pre or
similar.

poc