nfile caused system to stop

[Mike Ingram]

Hi,

My HP-UX 11.0 system (T600) "died" on Friday, and upon investigation, found that the nfile parameter had been exceeded. I now run "sar -v" regularly to monitor the nfile growing.
It is increasing at an alarming rate, and it seems I will need to reboot within the next couple of days.
Is there any way to find out where the problem is coming from? Are there any commands I can run to determine what is causing the problem?
Is it possible that it's a new script that is causing the problem? Is a reboot the only way of reducing the ever increasing count?
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

[Devender Khatana]

Hi,

nfile defines the max. no. of open files in the system. The files are opened by vaious applications running in the system. It could be because of poorly written applications where opened files are not closed properly or the situation where parameter is not set properly.

A restart of the application should be able to reduce this without requiring the OS to restart. But a better idea will be to look for the application which is opening these many files & if that is doing it right then increase parameter.

HTH,
Devender

[Matthew_50]

Is there any way to find out where the problem is coming from?

yes

Are there any commands I can run to determine what is causing the problem?

Yes, you can run your new script and use glance or other 3rd party tool to monitor the process detail information.

Is it possible that it's a new script that is causing the problem?

Maybe,

Is a reboot the only way of reducing the ever increasing count?

Yes,

you can increasing the nfile value via kmtune or kctune(11.23) by command line or use sam to update the value.

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Download and install the lsof (list open files) utility.
http://gatekeep.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Sysadmin/lsof-4.74/

It should be able to list the application that is opening so many files.

[Mike Ingram]

many thanks for the replies.
I will download lsof and see where that leads me!