On Fri, Mar 25, 2005 at 03:07:32PM +0000, Matthias Scheler wrote:
> In article <d212ep$bl5$1@colwyn.zhadum.de>,
> 	tron@zhadum.de (Matthias Scheler) writes:
> > this morning a daemon on my system died with this error message:
> > 
> > Mar 25 09:20:26 colwyn milter-greylist: mkstemp("/var/milter-greylist/greylist.db-000481il") failed: Too many open files in system
> > 
> > I thought the system had run out of file descriptors until I found a lot
> > of these in the kernel messages:
> > 
> > vnode: table is full - increase kern.maxvnodes or NVNODE
> > 
> > What could cause this?
> 
> It look like it was a combination of:
> 1.) KDE build in a change root environment which uses several null mounts.
> 2.) A script running "find" on a directory contain four checked out
>     NetBSD source trees.

There is some kind of serious bug here.  Things should run slower if you
fill up the vnode table, but they should still run -- the table should be
managed by LRU.