xorg: Maximum number of clients reached

[Michael Butash]

Thanks for the comments Matt - in line.

On 06/12/2015 02:18 PM, Matt Graham wrote:
> On 2015-06-11 17:20, Michael Butash wrote:
>> [X reaching a maximum number of clients is a problem] in that it
>> simply refuses to open new [X clients], and [I] find this happens
>> more and more these days. Am I like the only actual person to use
>> linux these days that this occurs with?
>
> I've never seen this happen.  What do you get when this is happening 
> and you do "xlsclients | sort | uniq -c" ?  I currently have 64 X 
> clients running here.  Most KDE things show up as 2 or 3 X clients.  
> plasma-desktop shows up as 20.  firefox shows up as 1.
I was actually trying to remember that command as I've seen it 
referenced and checked before, so thanks for that.

Every now and then problem will piss me off royally as literally my pc 
won't be able to wake my monitors up out of dpms sleep because of this 
(presumably), thus I have to hard reboot.  Odd part is when it freaks 
like this, even ssh'ing in from my laptop, killing some pids (ie. 
chrome|chromium I have an xargs script I keep to seek and destroy all), 
and it still won't wake then.  I need add something to watch these...

After it did this the other day upon composition of the email, I killed 
the chrom*'s, and it's been a bit stable.  xrestop was another that was 
recommended to watch, but by the time I hit that limit, even xrestop 
gives me the "max number of clients reached", even though a cli 
application...

Another way I know my system is almost ready to implode is waking up out 
of monitor sleep, expecting to see the simple-locker screen, rather I 
see a full desktop, unhidden, but I can't actually click on anything.  
Yeah, so much for privacy/security, but at least someone couldn't 
interact with it.  It requires me to ctrl-alt-F1, switch to a tty, and 
back to F7 to see the locker again, unlock, and actually use my 
desktop.  Seem another byproduct of xorg freaking out.

At the (working) moment...

mb at host:~$ xlsclients | sort | wc -l
144
mb at host:~$ xlsclients | sort | uniq -c
       1 host  baloo_file
       1 host  bamfdaemon
       1 host  Banshee
       1 host  blueman-applet
       1 host  cairo-dock
       1 host  chromium-browser
       1 host  dolphin
       1 host  eom
       1 host  evince
       1 host  gcalctool
       1 host  gkrellm
       1 host  gnome-terminal
       1 host  ibus-ui-gtk3
       1 host  ibus-x11
       1 host  kactivitymanagerd
       3 host  kded4
       1 host  'kdeinit4: kded4 [kdeinit]'
       1 host  'kdeinit4: ksmserver [kdeinit]'
       1 host  kglobalaccel
       1 host  klipper
       1 host  kmix
       1 host  knotify4
       1 host  konsole
       1 host  korgac
       1 host  krunner
       2 host  ksmserver
       1 host  kuiserver
       1 host  kwalletd
       6 host  kwin
       1 host  mate-screensaver
       1 host  nautilus
       5 host  okular
       1 host  pavucontrol
       1 host  Pidgin
       1 host  plasma-desktop
       1 host  pluma
       1 host  polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1
       1 host  soffice.bin
       1 host  thunderbird
       1 host  transmission-remote-gtk
       2 host  /usr/bin/baloo_file
       3 host  /usr/bin/dolphin
       1 host  /usr/bin/kactivitymanagerd
       2 host  /usr/bin/kglobalaccel
       3 host  /usr/bin/klipper
       8 host  /usr/bin/kmix
       8 host  /usr/bin/konsole
       2 host  /usr/bin/korgac
       3 host  /usr/bin/krunner
       2 host  /usr/bin/kuiserver
       2 host  /usr/bin/kwalletd
      13 host  /usr/bin/okular
      29 host  /usr/bin/plasma-desktop
       2 host /usr/lib/kde4/libexec/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1
       2 host  /usr/lib/libreoffice/program/soffice.bin
       1 host  /usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox
       2 host  /usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox --comment shitxp --startvm 
81289eb9-7de8-492c-9a4f-56977a2b8eca --no-startvm-errormsgbox
       1 host  vino-server
       2 host  VirtualBox
       1 host  vmware
       1 host  vmware-tray
       1 host  vmware-unity-helper
       1 ''  /usr/lib/libreoffice/program/soffice

I made a note on my desktop  (dry erase pen + glass tabletop == best 
whiteboard ever) to check that next time it freaks out.
>> I've seen reports of this, stating it's a hard-coded thing in xorg
>> code, which I find entirely asinine
>
> It probably seemed like a reasonable assumption back when the X11 
> protocol was designed that an X client would only make 1 connection to 
> the server, and that having 256 or 512 X clients at once was enough.  
> I don't have the Xorg source here so can't find where this is set, 
> either.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/25273/what-is-the-max-number-of-x-clients
>
>> Chrome/Chromium that launches some 300 flocks on various things, and
>> blows out the 256/512 client count on xorg.
>
> What did you mean by "flocks"?  If Chrome creates a separate X client 
> for every browser tab, that'd probably cause stupidity, but I could 
> see it doing that.  (Having fewer than 30 tabs open at any given time 
> would fix that if it were the case.)
File locks, or rather just open files, bad nomenclature on my part. 
Actually I mean to include a "k" after that, or 300,000 is what I see 
chrome wanting to use from a ulimit perspective.  I've seen that open by 
chrome|chromium between them consume 300,000k+ files opened, mostly 
every tab calling hundreds of libs each they require.  This was the 
first limit I started hitting, eventually having to bump up my ulimit 
counts in limits.conf to a higher (borderline absurd) number.

mb at host:~$ cat /etc/security/limits.conf | grep nofile
#        - nofile - max number of open files
#*         soft     nofile    16384
*         soft     nofile    524288
#*         hard     nofile    32768
*         hard     nofile    786432

The commented bits were the old default ubuntu limits, and my updated, 
blown way the heck out of proportion limits for how I work with them.  
Either modern linux needs to accomodate ridiculous necessity of modern 
apps, or modern apps need to respect why those limits were set to what 
they were.  Who is right?  Who knows, start holy war.
>> I have 3 chrome profiles open, some pdfs, libreoffice,
>> some chrome apps, some file manager windows (dolphin/kde), and not
>> much else. [...]  am I the only person that really "uses" a linux
>> desktop to see these?
>
> Obviously not if you found some other people complaining on a search 
> engine.  First thing to do is figure out which program is causing the 
> stupidity.  I was surprised to see 20 plasma-desktop clients here, 
> because plasma applets are useless and I didn't think I had any of 
> them running at all.
Agreed.  The file handler issue was the biggest issue, but both it and 
the xclientslimits, and maybe others are crippling my usability as I 
can't trust my desktop any longer.  I constantly lose work as I'm 
scratching in a gedit window without autosaves when I have to reboot.  
I'm less worried about my fork-bombing my system as I watch for memory 
leaks, but rather these almost dumb limits considering modern apps 
ignore respectable limits in various components of linux are my biggest 
limiter.