Unable to launch applications using panel.

[Colin Alie]

On Wed, 24 Aug 2005 13:31:33 +0200
Jasper Huijsmans <jasper at xfce.org> wrote:

> Colin Alie schreef:
> ...
> > 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
> > 
> 
> I just did an lsof myself, and don't have these entries. The worrying 
> part is the "can't identify protocol". Does anybody know what could 
> cause that?
> 
> > 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)
> 
> As other people have mentioned this is from the weather plugin. I do use 
> it as well and don't see any open files. It almost looks like your 
> system has some trouble closing file descriptors, but I have no idea if 
> that is even possible.
> 
> > 
> > Does anybody have any idea what these files ar for and why xfce4-panel needs to open so many?
> > 
> 
> What happens if you restart the panel (right-click on a handle -> Restart)?

Well, last evening my xsession suddenly died and I was thrown back to the gdm login screen (I was playing with the panel at the time but I can't remember exactly what I was doing).  So, as of right now, I can launch apps from the panel again but experience tells me that, over time, the problem will eventually reoccur.  I just checked the output of `lsof -c xfce4-panel` and, after about 40 minutes, I have two entries similar to what I showed above:

COMMAND    PID    USER   FD   TYPE     DEVICE    SIZE      NODE NAME
xfce4-pan 3745 aliecol    4u  sock        0,4           1846074 can't identify protocol
xfce4-pan 3745 aliecol    5u  sock        0,4           1846365 can't identify protocol

I'm using Debian Sarge which comes with xfce4 4.0.5.

BTW, the context menu on my panel handles does not contain the option to restart.  This must have been added in a later version of xfce (?).