4 ms·
Ask HN: what's going on with HN?
Can't access it for hours.
- brandnewlow 18y agoHad the same exact problem about 10 days ago, as well.
- nazgulnarsil 18y agous hackers wouldn't get paid much if computers always behaved themselves.
- alaskamiller 18y agoYou should ask for you money back.
- tuukkah 18y agoOne good reason to ask about downtime is to learn from other people's troubles and about their tools.
- amvp 18y agoWelcome back. I missed you.
- pg 18y agoThe server got wedged: it couldn't write to the log file because there were too many files open. Still not sure why there were so many files open. I've never seen that error before. But the program that notices when the server is wedged and kills it didn't catch it in this case, because instead of not responding it would respond but with an empty page.
- shafqat 18y agoWhat was the exact error? What kind of files were open? If you want to share, I'm sure lots of us would be interested to hear the details so we know what to look out for.
- jey 18y agoSounds like the limit for the maximum number of open File Descriptors (FDs) was reached. On Linux, you can check the limit by doing: cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max You can change this limit: echo 100000 > /proc/sys/fs/file-max This limit is also available through the "fs.file-max" sysctl. The "lsof" tool is great for seeing what FDs a process has open. Note that FDs are used for more than just regular files: directories, sockets, pipes, and other file-like objects too.
- abstractbill 18y agonetstat is also handy here (e.g. sometimes you find a single remote IP is holding open way more sockets than it should be).
- axod 18y agoAlso ulimit and /etc/security/limits.conf The default for max open files (1024) is ridiculously low. First thing to do when installing linux, up the max open file limits.
- pg 18y agoIt looks as if most of the file descriptors in use at any given time refer to closed tcp connections. We're still trying to figure out what this means.
- delackner 18y agoIn other news, productivity across the globe spiked today...
- noodle 18y agoi have to admit, i only found myself slightly more productive because i was distracted wondering what was wrong with HN and periodically checking to see if it was back