Question

I have a script which generates like 16000 html pages and saves it in the system. after 1013 pages i get the error: Too many open files.

This is the Ruby code which generates the files

FileUtils.mkdir_p "public/users_directory/#{DEFAULT_COUNTRY_CODE}/#{prefix}"
FileUtils.mkdir_p "public/users_directory/#{DEFAULT_COUNTRY_CODE}/#{prefix}/#{n/1000}"

html_file = File.new("public/users_directory/#{DEFAULT_COUNTRY_CODE}/#{prefix}/#{n/1000}/#{n}.html", "w")
html_file.write(html)
html_file.close

as you can see i close the file in the last line….

Does somebody know what i am doing wrong here? I have Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS

Thanks a lot

Edit:

This is the whole script

    def self.fetching_directory_page(n=1, letter = nil)
      id = letter == '' ? "" : "/#{letter.upcase}"
      url = "this is a valid url :)"
      agent = WWW::Mechanize.new
      page = agent.get(url)
      html = page.search('div#my_profile_body').to_html

      prefix = id == '' ? 'all' : letter
      FileUtils.mkdir_p "public/users_directory/#{DEFAULT_COUNTRY_CODE}/#{prefix}"
      FileUtils.mkdir_p "public/users_directory/#{DEFAULT_COUNTRY_CODE}/#{prefix}/#{n/1000}"

      html_file = File.new("public/users_directory/#{DEFAULT_COUNTRY_CODE}/#{prefix}/#{n/1000}/#{n}.html", "w")
      html_file.write(html)
      html_file.close

      puts "+ CREATED #{prefix}/#{n/1000}/#{n}.html" 

      new_url = page.parser.xpath("//a[@class='next_page']")[0]['href'] rescue nil

      if new_url.present?
        self.fetching_directory_page(n+1, letter)
      end
    end

It is fetching all the users of my users directory and saves the page for caching reasons. It generates 16000 files in total.

This is results for ulimit-a

    core file size          (blocks, -c) 0
    data seg size           (kbytes, -d) unlimited
    scheduling priority             (-e) 0
    file size               (blocks, -f) unlimited
    pending signals                 (-i) 24640
    max locked memory       (kbytes, -l) 32
    max memory size         (kbytes, -m) unlimited
    open files                      (-n) 24000
    pipe size            (512 bytes, -p) 8
    POSIX message queues     (bytes, -q) 819200
    real-time priority              (-r) 0
    stack size              (kbytes, -s) 8192
    cpu time               (seconds, -t) unlimited
    max user processes              (-u) 24640
    virtual memory          (kbytes, -v) unlimited
    file locks                      (-x) unlimited

After editing /etc/security/limits i dont get the error Too many open files but it just gets stuck

lsof -u username returns a list of more or less 600 entries and it doesnt change while doing the script

Answer 1

Open files weren’t causing the problem. It was the recursive method. I changed that and things work great.