golang/go

syscall: treat ENFILE as a temporary error, like EMFILE

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#35,131 opened on Oct 24, 2019

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NeedsFixOS-Windowshelp wanted

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Description

Does this issue reproduce with the latest release?

Yes

What operating system and processor architecture are you using (go env)?

Linux

What did you do?

One of our servers ran out of file handles (/proc/sys/fs/file-max). This led net.Listener.Accept() to return ENFILE (not EMFILE). Since ENFILE is not considered a temporary error, http.Server.Serve exited it's accept loop and returned ENFILE.

What did you expect to see?

ENFILE should be treated as temporary if returned by accept (and possible others). http.Server should not abort its accept loop when encountering ENFILE.

What did you see instead?

The application which received ENFILE logged the error, and continued running without a working listener / http server. If the application had followed the common log.Fatalln(http.Serve(...)) it would have crashed.

Contributor guide

Research direction
Investigate where temporary errors are defined and add ENFILE to that list.
Tech stack
go
Domain
backend
Issue type
Bug
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
2
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
1-3 hours
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
Active
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
Clear
Prerequisites
Go
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
65