For when graceful-fs doesn’t work… or you just want to understand where the leak is coming from. Follow this process.
(e.g. graceful-fs isn’t gonna fix your wagon if your issue is with sockets.)
From My Blog Article: http://www.blakerobertson.com/devlog/2014/1/11/how-to-determine-whats-causing-error-connect-emfile-nodejs.html
How To Isolate
This command will output the number of open handles for nodejs processes:
lsof -i -n -P | grep nodejs
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
...
nodejs 12211 root 1012u IPv4 151317015 0t0 TCP 10.101.42.209:40371->54.236.3.170:80 (ESTABLISHED)
nodejs 12211 root 1013u IPv4 151279902 0t0 TCP 10.101.42.209:43656->54.236.3.172:80 (ESTABLISHED)
nodejs 12211 root 1014u IPv4 151317016 0t0 TCP 10.101.42.209:34450->54.236.3.168:80 (ESTABLISHED)
nodejs 12211 root 1015u IPv4 151289728 0t0 TCP 10.101.42.209:52691->54.236.3.173:80 (ESTABLISHED)
nodejs 12211 root 1016u IPv4 151305607 0t0 TCP 10.101.42.209:47707->54.236.3.172:80 (ESTABLISHED)
nodejs 12211 root 1017u IPv4 151289730 0t0 TCP 10.101.42.209:45423->54.236.3.171:80 (ESTABLISHED)
nodejs 12211 root 1018u IPv4 151289731 0t0 TCP 10.101.42.209:36090->54.236.3.170:80 (ESTABLISHED)
nodejs 12211 root 1019u IPv4 151314874 0t0 TCP 10.101.42.209:49176->54.236.3.172:80 (ESTABLISHED)
nodejs 12211 root 1020u IPv4 151289768 0t0 TCP 10.101.42.209:45427->54.236.3.171:80 (ESTABLISHED)
nodejs 12211 root 1021u IPv4 151289769 0t0 TCP 10.101.42.209:36094->54.236.3.170:80 (ESTABLISHED)
nodejs 12211 root 1022u IPv4 151279903 0t0 TCP 10.101.42.209:43836->54.236.3.171:80 (ESTABLISHED)
nodejs 12211 root 1023u IPv4 151281403 0t0 TCP 10.101.42.209:43930->54.236.3.172:80 (ESTABLISHED)
....
Notice the: 1023u (last line) – that’s the 1024th file handle which is the default maximum.
Now, Look at the last column. That indicates which resource is open. You’ll probably see a number of lines all with the same resource name. Hopefully, that now tells you where to look in your code for the leak.
If you don’t know multiple node processes, first lookup which process has pid 12211. That’ll tell you the process.
In my case above, I noticed that there were a bunch of very similar IP Addresses. They were all 54.236.3.### By doing ip address lookups, was able to determine in my case it was pubnub related.
Command Reference
Use this syntax to determine how many open handles a process has open…
To get a count of open files for a certain pid
I used this command to test the number of files that were opened after doing various events in my app.
lsof -i -n -P | grep "8465" | wc -l
# lsof -i -n -P | grep "nodejs.*8465" | wc -l
28
# lsof -i -n -P | grep "nodejs.*8465" | wc -l
31
# lsof -i -n -P | grep "nodejs.*8465" | wc -l
34
What is your process limit?
ulimit -a
The line you want will look like this:
open files (-n) 1024
Permanently change the limit:
- tested on Ubuntu 14.04, nodejs v. 7.9
In case you are expecting to open many connections (websockets is a good example), you can permanently increase the limit:
-
file: /etc/pam.d/common-session (add to the end)
session required pam_limits.so -
file: /etc/security/limits.conf (add to the end, or edit if already exists)
root soft nofile 40000 root hard nofile 100000 -
restart your nodejs and logout/login from ssh.
-
this may not work for older NodeJS you’ll need to restart server
-
use instead of if your node runs with different uid.