Unable to launch applications using panel.

[Colin Alie]

I posted the following message to the list back in April:

> A couple of days ago, I noticed that I was unable to launch applications using the panel.  When I do click on an icon, an Error box opens with the following message:

> "Failed to create pipe for communicating with child process (Too many open files)"

> Any idea what's causing this?  I searched the mailing list archives but found no reference to this.  I'm using XFCE 4.0.5 from Debian Sarge.

At the time, Sjon thought that I may have hit a system-wide file limit but I am still able to launch programs from a terminal, via the file manager (xffm), and using "Run Program..." from the desktop context menu.  Just not from the panel.

Jasper Huijsmans believed that it was a problem with GLib.  This prompted a search on Google which led me to examining the list of open files using 'lsof'.  As it turns out, it appears that xfce4-panel is implicated, at least indirectly.

xfce4-panel has opened 1024 files and I'm guessing that 1024 is the maximum number that a single application is permitted to open.  866 of these files produce the following entry in the 'lsof' output (the file descriptor and node are different but everything else is the same):

COMMAND    PID    USER   FD   TYPE     DEVICE    SIZE    NODE NAME
xfce4-pan 4305 aliecol 1021u  sock        0,4         1062286 can't identify protocol

Another 153 files are of the form:

COMMAND    PID    USER   FD   TYPE     DEVICE    SIZE    NODE NAME
xfce4-pan 4305 aliecol 1022u  IPv4    1064848             TCP 192.168.1.123:42233->xoap.weather.com:www (CLOSE_WAIT)

Does anybody have any idea what these files ar for and why xfce4-panel needs to open so many?

Until next time, Colin.
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