Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Find centralized, trusted content and collaborate around the technologies you use most.

Teams

Q&A for work

Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search.

We use Hudson as a continuous integration system to execute automated builds (nightly and based on CVS polling) of a lot of our projects.

Some projects poll CVS every 15 minutes, some others poll every 5 minutes and some poll every hour.

Every few weeks we'll get a build that fails with the following output:

FATAL: java.io.IOException: Too many open files
java.io.IOException: java.io.IOException: Too many open files
    at java.lang.UNIXProcess.<init>(UNIXProcess.java:148)
The next build always worked (with 0 changes) so we always chalked it up to 2 build jobs being run at the same time and happening to have too many files open during the process.
This weekend we had a build fail Friday night (automatic nightly build) with the message and every other nightly build also failed.  Somehow this triggered Hudson to continuously build every project which failed until the issue was resolved.  This resulted in a build every 30 minutes or so of every project until sometime Saturday night when the issue magically disappeared. 
                We haven't had the problem in quite a long time.  If it crops up again I'll be sure to send the requested information along.
– Randyaa
                Feb 8, 2010 at 14:02
                Kohsuke - perhaps a Jenkins enhancement could be to keep an eye on file descriptor limits and self repair by running the GC then? We are running on boxes with large memory sizes (soon to be in the 96G range), so it can run for some time before trying to GC.
– Danny Staple
                Feb 21, 2011 at 12:13
                link broken - Wayback Machine link - web.archive.org/web/20200427071509/https://wiki.jenkins.io/…
– Smile
                Sep 8, 2021 at 8:04
One of the most common problem causing "Too many open files" is to have Active Directory plugin enabled and configured in Jenkins. There are known issues with this plugin which cause enormous number of threads to show up and "Too many open files" error in logs as well. After disabling it and switching to LDAP authentication I did not experience Jenkins to hang anymore.
        
Thanks for contributing an answer to Stack Overflow!
Please be sure to answer the question. Provide details and share your research!
But avoid …
Asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers.
Making statements based on opinion; back them up with references or personal experience.
To learn more, see our tips on writing great answers.