this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
36 points (100.0% liked)

Linux

13111 readers
209 users here now

A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)

Also, check out:

Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Every 15 minutes exactly, in whatever terminal window(s) I have connected to my server, I'm getting these system-wide broadcast message:

Broadcast message from systemd-journald@localhost (Sun 2026-02-15 00:45:00 PST):  

systemd[291622]: Failed to allocate manager object: Too many open files  


Message from syslogd@localhost at Feb 15 00:45:00 ...  
 systemd[291622]:Failed to allocate manager object: Too many open files  

Broadcast message from systemd-journald@localhost (Sun 2026-02-15 01:00:01 PST):  

systemd[330416]: Failed to allocate manager object: Too many open files  


Message from syslogd@localhost at Feb 15 01:00:01 ...  
 systemd[330416]:Failed to allocate manager object: Too many open files  

Broadcast message from systemd-journald@localhost (Sun 2026-02-15 01:15:01 PST):  

systemd[367967]: Failed to allocate manager object: Too many open files  


Message from syslogd@localhost at Feb 15 01:15:01 ...  
 systemd[367967]:Failed to allocate manager object: Too many open files  

The only thing I found online that's kind of similar is this forum thread, but it doesn't seem like this is an OOM issue. I could totally be wrong about that, but I have plenty of available physical RAM and swap. I have no idea where to even begin troubleshooting this, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

ETA: I'm not even sure if this is necessarily a bad thing that's happening, but it definitely doesn't look good, so I'd rather figure out what it is now before it bites me in the ass later

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] graycube@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You can also look at how many network sockets you have open and where they are connecting. netstat -an will give you a quick look. lsof can help you figure out what is using those ports.

[–] graycube@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If you really need that many connections there are some tcp tunables you can do to help them be more efficient.

I went to sleep last night after posting this and left a ssh connection open to see what it did in the morning when I woke up. And when I woke up and checked it out, I found that coincidentally it stopped doing the timer almost exactly as I went to sleep, yet I don't think I was doing anything that would make that happen. I have no idea why it stopped, but it hasn't started again either.