Michael and I played around with some different settings, and here are my notes.
1) Package kde-runtime seems to install /etc/sysctl.d/30-baloo-inotify-limits.conf which sets max_user_watches to 512*1024 'slabtop' says that my baseline kernel memory is 380-420MB with no containers running. 2) With fs.inotify.max_queued_events = 16384 fs.inotify.max_user_instances = 128 fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288 go-run-lxc.sh fails to start container number 13. with "x-013 failed to boot" Kernel memory has grown to 1076MB up from 400MB with 141816K dentry 564320K btrfs_inode As the largest items. 3) However if I set fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 8192 It fails again at exactly 13 containers. So while in a real-world scenario, max_user_watches may come into play, a "standard" desktop value of 512K is plenty (at least to have machines provision). (I do believe I've seen max_user_watches come into play while using Juju in the past, it just isn't the specific problem in the go-lxc-run.sh script which takes Juju out of the picture.) 4) If I then play around with 'max_user_instances' with: fs.inotify.max_queued_events = 16384 fs.inotify.max_user_instances = 256 fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288 I then fail on the 19th container, with error: Failed to change ownership of: <random filename here> Kernel memory is up to: 1363MB Top entries are: 178872K dentry 723104K btrfs_inode And at this point, my machine is behaving poorly. Things like "lxd delete --force" actually fails to cleanup instances, because "error: unable to open database file". And Term crashed at least one time. I even tried at one point to set: fs.inotify.max_user_instances=2048 But it still failed at 19 (that was when Term crashed). But I'm pretty confident that it means we're exhausting some other limit, rather than inotify max_user_instances or max_user_watches, since changing either of them doesn't actually increase the number of containers. I'm going to run some more tests with Juju in the loop. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1602192 Title: when starting many LXD containers, they start failing to boot with "Too many open files" To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/juju/+bug/1602192/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs