Ytdyklly

I run a public proxy and I've got about 400 clients, but when I check the logfile:

/var/etc/privoxy/logfile

I get lots of:

unable to take any additional connections.

In /etc/privoxy/config I have set max-client connections to 100000000000000 and I'm still getting the error. What is going on? My server is powerful and I'm not getting any lag or problems with the internet connections on it.

In the config file it says that connections are limited to the resources of the server, but I guess this is not the case here?

Is there any messages in your dmesg log? Also what's the underlying OS distro? I'd be suspicious that your kernel is probably configured using stock settings, you probably need to increase file descriptors or some limited resource on the box.

For example

This command shows the maximum number of files that your kernel is able to have open:

$ cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max

309210

This command shows how many are in use of the available:

$ cat /proc/sys/fs/file-nr 

5568    0   309210



Where:

5568    The number of allocated file handles.

0       The number of unused-but-allocated file handles.

309210  The system-wide maximum number of file handles.

So in the above case I have plenty of file handles available.

If you want to increase the maximum number of descriptors you can do it on the live system with this command:

sudo sysctl -w fs.file-max=400000

To make it the default from reboot to reboot:

vim /etc/sysctl.conf

And add the following line:

fs.file-max = 400000

Additional sysctl parameters

The above is one possible issue. There are a multitude of parameters that are configured in the kernel which limits it's resources on a given system. You can see the complete list of parameters using this command:

sysctl -a

Don't just arbitrarily change values in here!!! Research them to see if they're set to a limit that privoxy is exceeding and then test to see if raising this parameter fixes your issue.

Also try to understand if it makes sense that you're running out of this resource. If you're running out of file descriptors, don't just arbitrarily raise it to a higher value. Trying to determine if privoxy isn't letting go of open files correctly is a much better solution to your problem rather then just blindly raising the limit.

References

• Linux: Find Out How Many File Descriptors Are Being Used


• Linux Increase The Maximum Number Of Open Files / File Descriptors (FD)