Maximum number of clients reached GTK-WARNING ** Cannot open display: :0

[wendallsan]

Hi everyone,

I upgraded from 11.10 to 12.04 as soon as it was out of beta, and have been plagued by a problem ever since. After my computer has run for a few hours (maybe around 4 or so), I can't open any new programs from the Unity Launcher. If I try to open them from the command line (in the example below, I'm attempting to open Chrome), I get the following message:

Maximum number of clients reachedMaximum number of clients reached
(chromium-browser:29820): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :0

I'm unable to open any programs unless I close a currently open program (which I assume reduces the number of 'clients') or reboot my computer. On reboot, it runs fine for a few hours again, then starts having this problem again. I have 2 instances of 12.04 installed on my system and they both have this problem. I'm running the 64 bit version of the OS on an AMD Phenom II X6 system w/ 4 gigs of ram. Happy to share any other info about my system if there's hope I can get this fixed! Let me know if anyone has seen this before . . .

[hwttdz]

I haven't seen that message before, but it does seem to be an x11 issue. Probably more related to not freeing resources when clients exit than from having too many clients. This thread:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/4499/...ached-x-errors

might give you some ideas of where to poke around. It looks like there are a few programs which might be culprits (thread mentions chrome and gnome-screensaver), so you could try using xscreensaver and firefox/midori/epiphany... for a little and see if that solves anything?

[wendallsan]

Thanks for the reply. The issue is not specific to chrome (I just happened to be trying to open it for the example in my 1st post), but will happen with any apps as long as the machine runs for a while. I usually have Eclipse, Firefox, Banshee, Deluge, and Filezilla running, and sometimes use Chrome for testing sites out, etc. I'm beginning to suspect Wally (the wallpaper changer), as I installed it on both instances of Ubuntu that I've got when I upgraded both to 12.04. I've disabled Wally and will see what happens . . . maybe Wally is not releasing resources each time it changes a wallpaper, and that eventually stacks up and bogs down my system. I'll post back later after I see if anything has improved. I also have the python script referenced in your post, have run that, and will keep it handy if I run into problems again to see if it helps.

thanks!

[***J***]

I have the same problem. I don't use chrome or screensavers. My setup:
ubuntu 12.04 lts
8 gb memory
amd fx 8120 cpu
geforce gtx 550 ti graphics card
64-bit
1.5 tb hdd space

[***J***]

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[***J***]

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[schragge]

Well, this message usually means one of two things: either you're actually running too many apps or you've run out of file descriptors.
To check for the first, try

xlsclients

For the last, try

sudo lsof -U +c0|(printf 'PID%3suser%6sFD%6sinode command\n';awk 'NR>1{printf"%5d %-8s%5s%10d %s\n",$2,$3,$4,$8,$1}')

To only check how many apps / open FDs you've got, append |wc -l at the end of both commands:

xlsclients|wc -l
sudo lsof -U|wc -l

[***J***]

Thanks. I'll try these the next time this happens.

[***J***]

Haven't had this happen again yet (probably because I'm being more careful with my computer's resources) but I've noticed that occasionally when I have vlc or qbittorrent open for long enough and put xlsclients in a terminal I'll see multiple instances of them open. This contrasts with top that says there is only one instance of them open. Is this normal behavior?

[***J***]

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