We had a similar problem running with an earlier Firebird release, where Firebird was consuming an increasing number of file descriptors. We rewrote some code that manipulated file descriptors elsewhere in our application, and the problem went away. Watch out for use of pipes, and also calls to fork() and exec(). It was very weird that the only symptom we saw was Firebird usage of file descriptors.

Liz

--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, Chris <coderight@...> wrote:
>
> I'm not sure if this is the right list as I'm using the Firebird 2.5
> RC2 (would that be the devel or this list?).
>
> Anyway, I'm running the SuperClassic (fb_smp_server) server on Linux
> and I'm having a problem where it never seems to release the lock
> files. If I look at /proc/sys/fs/file-nr the number just keeps
> growing and growing over time and eventually the whole system starts
> to die because too many files are open. Increasing the max open files
> does not fix it because Firebird will eat them all no matter how high
> it is.
>
> If I look at the output of lsof I see the fb_smp_server process has
> tens of thousands of /tmp/firebird/fb_lock_xxxx files open and it
> never seems to close them even when no clients are connected to the
> database.
>
> I'm running one database and one client connection at a time. The
> client process starts (new process), connects, does its thing, then
> disconnects and the client process ends.
>
> Anyone know what's going on? It seems like it should be closing
> those lock files, especially when nothing is connected to the
> database.
>
> CR
>