I'm moving my webapps from htpasswd authentication to ldap; I don't have much tied into my LDAP server yet (i.e., not my local logins, ejabberd, mail, etc.), but even with just me (my webapps are all personal use, none of my friends seem to have much interest ), I'm banging into file handle limits constantly.

The biggest offender appears to be my Pitchfork install; it updates part of the page with AJAX calls every second, by default. I dropped the refresh rate to 3 seconds, which kinda blows for usability, but I'm checking open file descriptors with a script, and I see slapd opening a new file handle almost every second.

I did bump up the max file descriptors for both my slapd and lighty users to 4096, but at the rate slapd is going, I'll hit that in just a few hours. Since lighty seems to stop serving pages completely once slapd runs out of file descriptors, that's no good.

I tried poking around with nscd, and googling around for answers, but mostly what I've found boils down to "upgrade openldap". I'm running Debian Stable, which will probably move from Etch to Lenny this weekend, which means I'll be going from slapd 2.3.30-5 to 2.4.11-1, so that might help, but if it doesn't, what else can I do?

Rather than waiting, I stuck "lenny" in my sources.list, dist-upgraded, and it looks like the new versions aren't leaking at all. Where I'd have slapd with hundreds of open filehandles after a few minutes of running lighty, now slapd stays at around 60. w00t!