Managing too many files

[yakatz]

Affected Puppet, Ruby, OS and module versions/distributions

• Puppet: 6.25.1
• Module version: 5.1.1

How to reproduce (e.g Puppet code you use)

On server:

  $alerts = [
    {
      name        => 'bigloss',
      alert_type  => 'loss',
      pattern     => '==0%,==0%,==0%,==0%,>0%,>0%,>0%',
      comment     => 'suddenly there is packet loss',
    },

    {
      name        => 'startloss',
      alert_type  => 'loss',
      pattern     => '==S,>0%,>0%,>0%',
      comment     => 'loss at startup',
    },

    {
      name        => 'noloss',
      alert_type  => 'loss',
      pattern     => '>0%,>0%,>0%,==0%,==0%,==0%,==0%',
      edgetrigger => true,
      comment     => 'there was loss and now its reachable again',
    },
  ]

  class { '::smokeping':
    mode   => 'standalone',
    alerts => $alerts,
  }

  ::Smokeping::Target <<| |>>

On targets:

  $ip      = dns_a($::fqdn)[0]
  $host    = regsubst($::fqdn,'^([-_0-9a-zA-Z]+)\..*$','\1')
  @@::smokeping::target{$host:
    pagetitle => "Connection to ${::fqdn}",
    menu      => $host,
    host      => $::fqdn,
    probe     => 'FPing',
  }

What are you seeing

We are checking 165 hosts with Smokeping. Puppet produces a warning:

Warning: The directory '/var/lib/smokeping/images' contains 2140 entries, which exceeds the default soft limit 1000 and may cause excessive resource consumption and degraded performance. To remove this warning set a value for `max_files` parameter or consider using an alternate method to manage large directory trees

What behaviour did you expect instead

No warning

Output log

[root@netmgr ~]# puppet agent -t
Info: Using environment 'production'
Info: Retrieving pluginfacts
Info: Retrieving plugin
Info: Retrieving locales
Info: Loading facts
Info: Caching catalog for netmgr.example.com
Info: Applying configuration version 'puppet6-production-1d4adbb305c'
Warning: The directory '/var/lib/smokeping/images' contains 2140 entries, which exceeds the default soft limit 1000 and may cause excessive resource consumption and degraded performance. To remove this warning set a value for `max_files` parameter or consider using an alternate method to manage large directory trees
Notice: Applied catalog in 73.35 seconds
[root@netmgr ~]#

Any additional information you'd like to impart

I couldn't find any mention of issues like this in the documentation. Even if there is no way to fix this in this module, a recommendation or at least a pointer to other puppet documentation about limits of directory management would be useful.