Lighttpd

You also have to raise the maximum for connections.

I suggest setting max fds to 10k and max connections to 3k to see if it helps.

Also keep an eye on the mod_status page to see why you have so many connections and maybe consider lowering the keep alive timeout.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to help.

I have:

server.max-fds = 8192
server.max-connections = 4096

# cat /proc/`ps ax | grep lighttpd | grep -v grep | awk -F " " '{print $1}'`/limits |grep "Max open files" 
Max open files            2048                 2048                 files   

lsof and netstat started every minute show that generally I hit up to ~1100 opened files when lighttpd shows "sockets disabled, connection limit reached".

Is there any way to debug this any further?

What about keepalive, as icy suggested?

I have it set to:

server.max-keep-alive-requests = 8
server.max-keep-alive-idle = 3

But it doesn't matter what I have it set to.

What matters, is that as soon as lighttpd reaches 1024 connections open, it refuses any communication - despite having these limits sets way beyond 1024.

Check your OS settings for limits.

What kind of limits? The one below? I've set it to 2048 from default 1024; according to lsof, I'm hitting the "sockets disabled, connection limit reached" when lighttpd has around 1000-1200 files open - so is still about 1000 files away from the limit.

# cat /proc/`ps ax | grep lighttpd | grep -v grep | awk -F " " '{print $1}'`/limits |grep "Max open files" 
Max open files            2048                 2048                 files  

I'm using Linux - should I be looking at something else?

Which OS are you using? I had a similiar issue with CentOS but when I setup Lighttpd on Arch Linux with the exact same config the problem never returned. I believe the issue is how the OS has the network setup and not with Lighttpd specifically.

I'm using Debian Lenny, which has 2.6.26 kernel. It doesn't have any SELinux etc. security policies enabled (which could be the case with CentOS).

lighty requires at least two fds per connection (one socket, one for backend, static files, ...)

Hi,

I have the same problem with my lighttpd installation on an up to date Debian Squeeze. This is my lighttpd.conf:

server.modules = (
"mod_access",
"mod_alias",
"mod_compress",
"mod_redirect",
"mod_rewrite",
)

#server.document-root = "/var/www"
server.document-root = "/drbd/www"
server.upload-dirs = ( "/var/cache/lighttpd/uploads" )
server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/error.log"
server.pid-file = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid"
server.username = "www-data"
server.groupname = "www-data"
server.max-fds = 8192
server.max-connections = 4096

index-file.names = ( "index.php", "index.html",
"index.htm", "default.htm",
" index.lighttpd.html" )

url.access-deny = ( "~", ".inc" )

static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".php", ".pl", ".fcgi" )

include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/use-ipv6.pl"

dir-listing.encoding = "utf-8"
#server.dir-listing = "enable"
server.dir-listing = "disable"

compress.cache-dir = "/var/cache/lighttpd/compress/"
compress.filetype = ( "application/x-javascript", "text/css", "text/html", "text/plain" )

include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/create-mime.assign.pl"
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/include-conf-enabled.pl"
fastcgi.server = (".php" =>
( "localhost" =>
(
"socket" => "/tmp/php-fastcgi.socket",
"bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php-cgi",
"bin-environment" => (
"PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "10000"
)
)
)
)

Enabled modules are: auth fastcgi simple-vhost status

lsof -n | grep -c lighttpd never goes above 130 and /server-status(generated from status plugin) counts about 100 connections max. Never the less, I got "sockets disabled, connection limit reached", which never resets.

Any ideas for deeper debugging or solutions?