Revert commit 0c2d64fb6cae9aae480f6a46cfe79f8d7d48b59f because it causes
(arguably poorly designed) existing userspace to spend interminable
periods closing billions of not-open file descriptors.
We could bring this back, with some sort of opt-in tunable in /proc, which
defaults to "off".
Peter's alanysis follows:
: I spent several hours trying to get to the bottom of a serious
: performance issue that appeared on one of our servers after upgrading to
: 2.6.28. In the end it's what could be considered a userspace bug that
: was triggered by a change in 2.6.28. Since this might also affect other
: people I figured I'd at least document what I found here, and maybe we
: can even do something about it:
:
:
: So, I upgraded some of debian.org's machines to 2.6.28.1 and immediately
: the team maintaining our ftp archive complained that one of their
: scripts that previously ran in a few minutes still hadn't even come
: close to being done after an hour or so. Downgrading to 2.6.27 fixed
: that.
:
: Turns out that script is forking a lot and something in it or python or
: whereever closes all the file descriptors it doesn't want to pass on.
: That is, it starts at zero and goes up to ulimit -n/RLIMIT_NOFILE and
: closes them all with a few exceptions.
:
: Turns out that takes a long time when your limit -n is now 2^20 (1048576).
:
: With 2.6.27.* the ulimit -n was the standard 1024, but with 2.6.28 it is
: now a thousand times that.
:
: 2.6.28 included a patch titled "rlimit: permit setting RLIMIT_NOFILE to
: RLIM_INFINITY" (0c2d64fb6cae9aae480f6a46cfe79f8d7d48b59f)[1] that
: allows, as the title implies, to set the limit for number of files to
: infinity.
:
: Closer investigation showed that the broken default ulimit did not apply
: to "system" processes (like stuff started from init). In the end I
: could establish that all processes that passed through pam_limit at one
: point had the bad resource limit.
:
: Apparently the pam library in Debian etch (4.0) initializes the limits
: to some default values when it doesn't have any settings in limit.conf
: to override them. Turns out that for nofiles this is RLIM_INFINITY.
: Commenting out "case RLIMIT_NOFILE" in pam_limit.c:267 of our pam
: package version 0.79-5 fixes that - tho I'm not sure what side effects
: that has.
:
: Debian lenny (the upcoming 5.0 version) doesn't have this issue as it
: uses a different pam (version).
Reported-by: Peter Palfrader <weasel@debian.org>
Cc: Adam Tkac <vonsch@gmail.com>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@googlemail.com>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org> [2.6.28.x]
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>