node.js - Simple nodejs http proxy fails with "too many open files"

Question

Well, ignore it. I have opened an issue https://github.com/joyent/node/issues/793

Trying to run http://www.catonmat.net/http-proxy-in-nodejs

var http = require('http');

http.createServer(function(request, response) {
  var proxy = http.createClient(80, request.headers['host'])
  var proxy_request = proxy.request(request.method, request.url, request.headers);
  proxy_request.addListener('response', function (proxy_response) {
    proxy_response.addListener('data', function(chunk) {
      response.write(chunk, 'binary');
    });
    proxy_response.addListener('end', function() {
      response.end();
    });
    response.writeHead(proxy_response.statusCode, proxy_response.headers);
  });
  request.addListener('data', function(chunk) {
    proxy_request.write(chunk, 'binary');
  });
  request.addListener('end', function() {
    proxy_request.end();
  });
}).listen(8080);

Fails after a huge number of requests with:

net.js:695
        self.fd = socket(self.type);
                  ^
Error: EMFILE, Too many open files
    at net.js:695:19
    at dns.js:171:30
    at IOWatcher.callback (dns.js:53:15)

node 0.4.2 on OSX 10.6

Answer 1

You may be hitting your (default) maximum value of opened files in your operating system (for Linux it's 1024), especially if your are doing huge number of requests. For example in Linux you can increase this resource limit with ulimit command:

ulimit -n 8192