Subject: Monitoring open files
From: "John A. Sullivan III" <jsullivan@opensourcedevel.com>
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:55:22 -0500

Hello, all.  Short version: How does one monitor open files for the
entirety of the VServer host file system? I'm
guessing /proc/sys/fs/file-nr will give me the information including all
guests but will only count file descriptors whereas doing lsof | wc -l
in the host will only give me the open files in the host itself.  Is
that correct?

Long version: We had a brief outage this morning where many of the
guests on one of our big VServer hosts started complaining about being
out of disk space.  There is plenty of free disk space and plenty of
available inodes.

I'm wondering if we are running out of available file handles with the
large number of systems we have on this fairly large piece of hardware.
I'd like to monitor it anyway as we are doing rsync based backups and I
gather they can consume an enormous number of file handles. Thus, what
is the best way to track this and diagnose our problem? Thanks - John
-- 
John A. Sullivan III
Open Source Development Corporation
+1 207-985-7880
jsullivan@opensourcedevel.com

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