I find a growing number of root owned dbus-daemon processes. Eventually, this results in a 'too many processes' error preventing something to fork, e.g. a login. They get created by batches of 4, every 30 minutes on my box. My box is a puppet client, so that these 30 minutes are not in a local cron tab. The pids are 11 units apart (when the box is otherwise idle). The command line is: //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session ~> uname -srv Linux 3.2.0-58-generic #88-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 3 17:37:58 UTC 2013 ~> aptitude show dbus Package: dbus State: installed Automatically installed: no Multi-Arch: foreign Version: 1.4.18-1ubuntu1.4 Priority: standard Section: devel Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com> Architecture: amd64 Uncompressed Size: 953 k Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14), libdbus-1-3 (>= 1.0.2), libexpat1 (>= 1.95.8), libselinux1 (>= 1.32), upstart-job, adduser, lsb-base (>= 3.2-14), upstart (>= 0.6.3-6), netbase (>= 4.45ubuntu3) Suggests: dbus-x11 Conflicts: dbus Provides: dbus Provided by: dbus Description: simple interprocess messaging system (daemon and utilities) Homepage: http://dbus.freedesktop.org/
~# ps -fu root | grep dbus-daemon | grep -v grep | tail -8 root 17509 1 0 11:25 ? 00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session root 17520 1 0 11:25 ? 00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session root 17531 1 0 11:25 ? 00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session root 17542 1 0 11:25 ? 00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session root 17972 1 0 11:55 ? 00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session root 17983 1 0 11:55 ? 00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session root 17994 1 0 11:55 ? 00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session root 18005 1 0 11:55 ? 00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session
Please report this to your distribution, which appears to be Ubuntu. dbus 1.4 is no longer supported upstream, except for security vulnerabilities. There are some Ubuntu-specific patches in their dbus package, I don't know whether those have any effect here. (In reply to comment #1) > ~# ps -fu root | grep dbus-daemon | grep -v grep | tail -8 > root 17509 1 0 11:25 ? 00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork > --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session The symptoms you described probably mean that something running as root is either running /usr/bin/dbus-launch, or attempting to access a D-Bus session via the autolaunch: transport while under a transient X11 session, 4 times every 30 minutes. If this machine does not intentionally run an X11 GUI or a D-Bus session, uninstalling the dbus-x11 package or making /usr/bin/dbus-launch non-executable might work around this. Don't do that if you use an X11 GUI environment, though. Since 1.4.8, dbus autolaunch has only been effective when DISPLAY is set and non-empty, so if this is autolaunch, an X11 session must be involved somehow.
Resolving as WORKSFORME; please reopen if you have evidence that this is a D-Bus bug and that it still exists in a supported version.
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