In some cases and depending on the load of the Internet service, you may encounter problems such as "INFO: The proxy service is unable to increase the number of filedescriptors".
¶ File descriptors
File descriptors are important on Linux because they determine how many system accesses the operating system is allowed to use.
A file descriptor (aka FD) is able to be a local network connection, a process execution, a read/write file…
If the proxy does not have the right to create a file descriptor then it can no longer operate correctly and Internet browsing will be severely disrupted.
We will see that file descriptors have two parameters.
The one that limits the Proxy service and the one that limits the whole system
¶ Connections Tracking
Another limiting value is also related to the number of monitored network connections the system is able to create.
When the proxy encounters a limitation either in system accesses or in network accesses it will complain about its inability to operate.
Depending on its operations, it is able to open a network port (3128) but no longer has the ability to use DNS or to send a TCP socket to the remote server.
This behavior is similar to a kind of freeze browsing.
The browser is connected to the proxy but runs in a loop until the connection expires.
The Artica v4.30 Service pack 415 has been built to highlight these parameters so that you can evaluate and modify them at your convenience and is able to let Artica modify it itself if parameters are too low for a standard production mode.
The 5.2 version of the proxy is more intensive in terms of TCP connections and file descriptors.
If you upgrade from version 4.x to 5.x, consider monitoring these values with statistics built by Artica.
When clicking on each link a graph is displayed in order to see the consumption of each limit
- To modify parameters, on the left menu, go to “Your Proxy” Global Settings"
- Click on Performance tab.
- filedescriptors (proxy): The number of allowed File descriptors for the proxy service
- filedescriptors (System): minimal: 80 128 The number of File descriptors allowed for the whole system.
Of course, this value must be much higher than the one defined for the proxy service - Max Connections tracking (System): Minimal 524 288 is the number of maximal local TCP connections allowed for the whole system.
The proxy being very consuming of network connections, do not be afraid to increase this value if necessary