File descriptors and warnings

[kybber]

Hi,

We just went over the limit for file descriptors on our Mumble-server, and log the following warnings on startup:

2010-07-08 15:00:43.089 Current booted servers require minimum 1043 file descriptors when all slots are full, but only 1024 file descriptors are allowed for this process. Your server will crash and burn; read the FAQ for details.
(...)
2010-07-08 15:00:43.116 Current booted servers require minimum 1074 file descriptors when all slots are full, but only 1024 file descriptors are allowed for this process. Your server will crash and burn; read the FAQ for details.
(...) and so forth forever and ever...

It seems from these numbers that one file descriptor is required per available slot. Each additional virtual server added to a host will therefore decrease the amount of available file descriptors by 20-50 or so, which means that in all rental environments the default ulimit of 1024 is way too low.

I suppose there is no way around the requirement of one file descriptor per slot, since each player needs a connecton. But is it really that much cause for concern that each server that is started after the limit has been hit needs to spew a warning to the logs about crashing and burning? I don't feel very concerned myself, since even though our host currently runs more than 1000 slots, only a tiny small fraction is normally in use at any given time. That makes this warning completely useless. Would it perhaps be possible to change this warning so that it is triggered *once* at startup, and then as the number of simultaneous used slots creeps towards the file descriptor limit and reaches, say, 80%, it is triggered again? That would remove a lot of cruft from server provider's logs.

Just a suggestion to make an excellent piece of software perhaps a tiny little bit better (for me) :)

[kissaki]

Mh.

On process startup one message would be enough.

But on Creating a new vserver or starting a new vserver while the process is already running a new warning should be logged.

And as a process-start will start every vserver one after the other, that will also log it.

I don't know who logs the warning, but if it's the vserver start-function it's not an easy fix and should/will probably stay this way.

You can also add a feature request in the feature request tracker:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=147372&atid=768008

That's probably a better place to suggest this.

As this is a rather serious and important warning, one should not take it lightly though. Ofc. you can calculate and estimate that this will not happen, but it still could and would be pretty bad for a commercial hoster.

The FAQ also states how to fix this limit/issue/warning by increasing the limit:

http://mumble.sourceforge.net/FAQ#I.27m_running_many_virtual_servers_or_have_many_users_connected.2C_and_the_server_becomes_unstable