/usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session: Error: WaylandMessage::Write() too many files to send

[Marcelo Cerri]

GDM, or more specifically is flooding systemd journal and /var/log/syslog via rsyslogd with gigabytes of the following messages:

Jan 31 08:44:26 rivendell /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session[285102]: Error: WaylandMessage::Write() too many files to send
Jan 31 08:44:26 rivendell /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session[285102]: :
Jan 31 08:44:26 rivendell /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session[283270]: Error: WaylandMessage::Write() too many files to send
Jan 31 08:44:26 rivendell /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session[283270]: :
Jan 31 08:44:26 rivendell /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session[285102]: Error: WaylandMessage::Write() too many files to send
Jan 31 08:44:26 rivendell /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session[285102]: :
Jan 31 08:44:26 rivendell /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session[283270]: Error: WaylandMessage::Write() too many files to send
Jan 31 08:44:26 rivendell /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session[283270]: :
Jan 31 08:44:26 rivendell /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session[285102]: Error: WaylandMessage::Write() too many files to send

I noticed the problem when I started to run out of disk because /var/log/syslog was consuming more than 400GiB. I noticed that rsyslogd starts to consume a lot of CPU trying to process such volume of messages.

[Marcelo Cerri (mhcerri)]

Some additional information. The problem is related to the Firefox snap.

There are always two different PIDs in this flood of messages (283270 and 285102, in the log I pasted in the description). I just tried to kill them with kill -9 expecting my wayland session to die, but instead it just killed the two instances of Firefox that I had running.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Logging in GNOME is sometimes confused. I think apps can inherit the log prefix from the shell (and then forget to set their own) so often the weird log messages aren't coming from GNOME, but from apps instead.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Fabien (afabien)]

Same bug here.
Using sway as a window manager.
PID between brackets is firefox's.

[Fabien (afabien)]

To avoid having disk full problems, I used the following workaround:

I created a file /etc/rsyslog.d/10-no-gdm-wayland.conf

Containing the following lines:
:msg, contains, "Error: WaylandMessage::Write() too many files to send" ~
:msg, contains, " :" ~

And then restarted rsyslog (as root): systemctl restart rsyslog.service

[Sean Burns (seancsb)]

Same problem and also related to Firefox but using Firefox via apt and not snap.

[Zoe (emnichtda)]

This actually also affects other distros, I use Arch Linux and Sway on my Laptop and Ubuntu on my PC. I have the same issue on Arch Linux Sway.

[BjornW (bjornw)]

Same problem here. Any suggestions on how I may help fixing this?

[Steve (stevebot)]

Also have this issue (100% cpu usage by /usr/sbin/rsyslogd) with Firefox in Sway on Ubuntu 22.04. So far I've only noticed this after reloading the sway config (`swaymsg reload` or Mod+Shift+c).

The log line comes from wayland-proxy[1], which is used by Firefox.

Fabien (afabien) wrote:
> To avoid having disk full problems, I used the following workaround:
>
> I created a file /etc/rsyslog.d/10-no-gdm-wayland.conf
> Containing the following lines:
> :msg, contains, "Error: WaylandMessage::Write() too many files to send" ~
> :msg, contains, " :" ~
>
> And then restarted rsyslog (as root): systemctl restart rsyslog.service

This workaround didn't work for me, even after replacing the `~` with `stop`.

[1] https://github.com/stransky/wayland-proxy/blob/1bd4f5fe0378d820a611a73f71326ba996e3ad7f/src/wayland-proxy.cpp#L222

[Frederic Van Espen (frederic-ve)]

This is probably the same issue: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=2153594

I don't have the issue when I launch firefox like: MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=0 firefox

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 became the default in firefox 121.

[Steve (stevebot)]

The Firefox issue can be found at: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1882449

The issue has been closed and supposedly fixed. The target milestone has been set to 125, which I assume means that it should be included in the Firefox 125 release planned for 16 April 2024. In the meantime, the recommended workaround is to run Firefox with `MOZ_DISABLE_WAYLAND_PROXY=1`.