Running out of file descriptors / infoseek.com

I am running into a problem where several of our servers are running out
of file descriptors on occasion. Upon examination, it appears that a
particular web server is involved.

What I see is that requests to URLs like:

http://www2.infoseek.com/images/large_circlei.gif

are resulting in the use of many file descriptors which are never
released. In fact, I just checked one of our servers and the above URL is
using up 23 file descriptors! There are a total of 93 file descriptors
currently in use for requests to http://www2.infoseek.com/images/*

From past experience, this number will continue to increase until I kill
the server and let it restart (HUPing it doesn't help).

From netstat -not I can see that all of these connections are in state
"CLOSE" (whatever that is. It isn't listed in the netstat man page,
although "CLOSED", "CLOSE_WAIT", and "CLOSING" are):

tcp 0 0 205.212.140.150:8080 205.212.140.99:1686 CLOSE on (2.06/0)

The first number in parenthesis (which I think is the timer expiration
time), changes continuously and seemingly randomly betwen 0.00 and 2.50.

I only see this on the infoseek.com servers, but I do see it on many of
their servers. It appears that they are using some kind of home-brew
server, as it doesn't return any identifying information in the HTTP
headers, treats a HEAD request as a GET request, and always returns the
current date and time as the Last-Modified-Date. In general, it is badly
behaved...

Is anyone else seeing this behavior? Does anyone have any ideas on how I
can stop it from doing this?

I thought that if I could cache these images then I would at least avoid
the problem somewhat. However, I don't know how to do this due to the
Last-Modified-Date being set to the current date.

As a last resort I can just block access to that damn directory, but that
doesn't seem like a terribly elegant solution... :-)

I am using a modified version of 1.1b7 (no changes to anything which could
affect this, though) under various versions of Linux (1.2.13, 2.0.6,
2.0.23).

Thanks in advance for any help.

Kevin

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 Kevin Fink <kevin@fink.com> N2H2, Creators of Bess
 http://www.fink.com/ 1301 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1501
 http://www.n2h2.com/ Seattle, WA 98101
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Received on Wed Dec 18 1996 - 15:32:11 MST