Too many open files?

[John Esak]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: filepro-list-bounces at lists.celestial.com
> [mailto:filepro-list-bounces at lists.celestial.com]On Behalf Of Butch
> Ammon
> Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 9:50 AM
> To: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
> Subject: Too many open files?
>
>
> Good morning...
>
> I recently saw a weird error message on filePro on SCO Unix
> yesterday (just one
> time, never happend the rest of the day, etc...)
>
> Yesterday was a busy day.  Everybody was working away and had
> countless things
> going on and multiple sessions of ICE-TCP (DejaWin) open, which
> enabled them to
> open two dclerks.  Others were busy with reports and other processing and
> whatnot.  The SCO Unix server was working hard -slow- but kept up
> and handled
> all the users and sessions and multiple processes going on at once.
>
> THEN.... One of the ladies upstairs was entering in a new order,
> which makes
> dozens of lookups, system commands, and call statements to
> complete the order.
> Right as she hit ESC ESC, she got this message:
>
> -----------------------------------
> *** A filePro Error Has Occurred***
>
> File Table Full.
>
> Too many filePro files open at once.
> Maximum is 20.
> ------------------------------------
>
> It kicked her out of the system, so then she closed out of
> everything, opened
> one session of ICE-TCP, got back into filePro, re-entered the
> order and it was
> perfectly fine and never happend again.
>
> I checked my Unix systems' /etc/profile, and I have PFFILES set
> to 110.  So I
> have no idea what caused the system to say "File Table Full".
> Was it the number
> of users in the system and perhaps everyone was doing lookups and call
> statements and whatnot at that precise moment that the lady was finishing
> entering the order and hit ESC ESC?
>
> Has anyone seen this error before?  Like I said, it happend only
> once that I
> have seen on a very busy day.  How can I prevent it from happening again?
>
> Thanks for the help.
>
> Butch Ammon
> Super Radiator Coils
> Richmond, VA

Butch,
This iindicates that you have an older message file on your system. It may
indicate that you have an older filePro version as well.

First of all PFFILES does only functions on the MS plastforms, not *nix. (At
least, that is my belief... could be wrong, but I doubt it.)  The FILES
parameter is a kernel tunable. It is set by default on the later SCO systems
to 110. Even though your filePro error message still has the wrong text in
it.

I can't imagine that you are on a version previous to 4.11 which is when the
fix for "Too many open files" was put in.  You must be on 5.0 I'm sure.
But, for whatever reason, you hit the system file limit without filePro
closing an old handle automatically (which it does correctly on the later
versions.)  There may be some chance your system FILES parameter is not set
to 110. It is my understanding that this tunable should never be set to
anything other than 110. There was an issue with doing this in older SCO
O/S's at least... this could be fixed now. However, I recently heard it
should still be set to 110.  (Check this value in /etc/conf/cf.d by entering
./configure and looking for the parameter NFILES.)

Other than assuring that this is correct, I don't know what else you could
do to help this situation, other than be sure to have the latest filePro,
recent SCO and patches, etc. Although, since about 5.4 it has been set to
1110. You could also investigate why you have an older
.../appl/fp/lib/errmsg file.

Don't feel bad if it is a very old file... I just checked mine and it says,
"Too many open files... Maximum is 60"!!  So, it is possible the best
version of the message file is still woefully out of date.

--
John Esak
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