[BUG] NPM 7 frequently causing EMFILE error when building image in Quay.io

[mfshao]

Not sure if this is a bug or a design/improvement of NPM 7 against NPM 6. But looks like NPM 7 would open more file descriptors and/or sockets when doing npm i comparing to NPM 6?

Current Behavior:

We noticed after migrating to NPM 7, our image build in Quay.io is much more frequently to fail with EMFILE error than before (using NPM 6).

In order to stabilize the build, we have reduce the maxsocket by a lot, now we are seting npm config set maxsockets=5 in our dockerfile.

If we downgrade back to NPM 6, our Quay.io builds runs fine with the default maxsockets=50 value.

Expected Behavior:

Image build in Quay.io using NPM 7 should be stable to success with the default config (or with maxsockets=50, which is the same value as for NPM 6)

Environment:

• OS: Ubuntu 20.04 as base image
• Node: 14.16.0
• npm: 7.7.5

[darcyclarke]

@mfshao is there any way you can provide a minimal reproduction case for this error? Sounds like this may be intermittant which would understandably be hard to reproduce but even if you could help in setting up a project with similar constratins to those of Quay.io it would help track down the problematic code paths. seems like this may be linked to this other issues just filed: #2978

[ruyadorno]

Linked issue has been resolved in npm@7.7.6 - let us know if you still see any problems! Thanks!