sysctl kern.openfiles

Hi,

I have a recent (2 days ago) -CURRENT on a box which I do some load and 
stress testing with (giving it a full load of e-mail to be filtered for 
Spam an Virus bei amavis with SpamAssassin and ClamAV). filtering is at 
a rate of about 3-5 mails per second over the day. The machine is a dual 
Xeon 2.4 GHz with 2 Gigs of RAM and a 3ware Escalade RAID Controller 
(which currently for no good reason but it was that way when I started 
is configured to RAID5 on 4 disks).

I see "sysctl kern.openfiles" constantly rising. I do not see any 
numbers close to it when using lsof or fstat to find what's eating 
files. Even stopping all daemons does not seem to lower the number in 
any way (although it sometimes goes a little bit lower, then rising 
again).

This means I run out of file descriptors if I let the machine running 
for some time und this load. I have ipfw configured (so that filtered 
mail does not get feeded back) in this way:

00100 allow ip from 127.0.0.0/8 to 127.0.0.0/8
00200 reset tcp from me to any dst-port 25
00300 allow ip from any to any
65535 deny ip from any to any

The open files:

lupin# sysctl kern.openfiles
kern.openfiles: 8447
lupin# fstat | wc -l
    1282
lupin# lsof | wc -l
    2820
lupin# netstat | fgrep -c tcp
6

This is during a buildworld and with no mails coming in, after the 
machine had been filtering for a few (maybe 10) minutes.

Is there any way to find out where the filedescriptors go? Do I do 
something wrong or can someone give me any further hints or confirm a 
similar behaviour?

I don't have too much time, the machine has to go live on sunday - so at 
this time I will have to go back to 4-STABLE or have something with 
RELENG_5_2 running.

I currently use SCHED_ULE and will try to switch back to SCHED_4BSD, 
just to test if this could be related. I do not have debugging options 
in this kernel and have /etc/malloc.conf linked to aj because I mainly 
needed to find about performance. I would really like to stay with 
FreeBSD5 instead of going back to 4 because of things like SMP and 
features like Filesystem Snapshots, which are in this case very handy 
for certain backup operations.

Thanx, Oliver

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