I'm running RHEL 4 with latest kernel 2.6.9-42.0.10.ELsmp and recently I noticed one of my servers started to show this error:

[root@srv ~]# cat /proc/net/ip_conntrack | wc -l
cat: /proc/net/ip_conntrack: No space left on device
25780
[root@srv ~]# cat /proc/net/ip_conntrack | wc -l
69035

As can be seen randomly the cat shows the error "No space left on device" and I think this has performance influence on servers network connection.

I have /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_conntrack_max set to 102400

Anyone knows how to get rid of the problem permanently? Restarting the server fixes it - have not measured for how long though.

Thank you.

noone has experienced this?

Logs of submitted bug reports, and lots of patches of supposed fixes. Feel free to try any or all applicable patches.

does it happen with all commands or just with cat? on all filesystems or just /proc ?

can you post your "df -h" and "mount -l"

how often does it happen? often enough for you to get an strace?

-James

I reverted back to 2.6.9-42.0.3.ELsmp and problem is gone.

to be complete, I post the output of commands you requested:

[root@srv ~]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 133G 40G 87G 32% /
/dev/sda1 99M 26M 68M 28% /boot
none 1014M 0 1014M 0% /dev/shm

[root@srv ~]# mount -l
/dev/sda3 on / type ext3 (rw,usrquota,grpquota) [/]
none on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
usbfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
/dev/sda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw) [/boot]
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)

weird, so you think it was a kernel bug? or the fact that /proc is recreated on reboot?

Problem returned even older kernel was applied after 1 day of operation. I got back to newest kernel and fiddling around with configuration. So far no good.