[GNUnet-developers] too many open files & gnunet-gtk

[Christian Grothoff]

This is in response to http://gnunet.cryss.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=24
and the patch submitted to limit the number of downloads.

I've just gone through the code to make it not die when it hits the limit.  I 
did not like the idea of introducing an arbitrary limit (which would break if 
ulimit is lower or be too conservative if ulimit is higher; not to mention 
that the exact number of open files per download is not that easy to 
establish), so what the code now does is print tons of warnings and errors, 
but gnunet-gtk should not die if it hits the limit.  Of course, if you select 
5 billion files for download at a time and the number of warnings you get is 
too much for your X server to handle at the same time, that may still be 
fatal (for X).  A workaround might be to not pop up a window and just log the 
message (or log them in the info-window and open that [once]).  Anyway, I'm 
too lazy to do that now.

I've tired it with ulimit -n 16 and then selected a dozen files for download, 
and it now no longer crashes when the open files limit is reached.

Christian