Unable to launch applications using panel (follow-up).

[Colin Alie]

I posted the following to the list back in April:

> I'm 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.

Sjon proposed that I may have hit a system limit on the number of open files but I am 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 suggested the problem originates in GLib and not in the panel.  I searched Google using the error string and eventually ended up using "lsof" to examine the open files on my system.  There does seem to be a problem with xfce4-panel, at least indirectly.

xfce4-panel has 1024 file descriptors assigned to it and I'm guessing that this is the limit that prevents me from launching new programs with the panel.  Of these 1024, 866 have the following output from 'lsof' (the file descriptor 'FD' and 'NODE' is unique in each instance' 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 are of the form:

COMMAND    PID    USER   FD   TYPE     DEVICE    SIZE    NODE NAME
xfce4-pan 4305 aliecol 1023u  IPv4    1067374             TCP 192.168.1.123:42236->xoap.weather.com:www (CLOSE_WAIT)

My intuition tells me that these files are not required and should have been closed at some point but weren't.  Does anybody have any insight as to what is going on?

Until next time, Colin.