Ubuntu
xorg-server package

  1. Bug #1518411
  2. Comment #7

Comment 7 for bug 1518411

Revision history for this message
Brett Johnson (linuxturtle) wrote : Re: "Maximum number of clients reached", new in Ubuntu 15.10

This bug has been reported over and over again since it was introduced in 12.04 (just do a LP search for "Maximum number of clients reached"). Now, for some reason in 15.10 it's much easier to reproduce. I hit the problem every day now, whereas I used to be able to go a couple weeks without hitting it. There are many clues in the older reports:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-screensaver/+bug/263211 seems to have gotten the most attention, and was closed with changes to gnome-screensaver, but I don't think that actually fixed the problem (just made gnome-screensaver quit making the problem show up). It seems to be some kind of X resource leak.

I don't know if this is relevant or helpful, but taking some of the comments from that bug report, here are some of the things folks did in that bug to troubleshoot:

xwininfo -root -children | wc -l

Over time, the resulting number keeps going up. It's currently at 430, and if I open a window (gcalc, for example), I'll get the "Maximum number of clients reached" error when trying to run xwininfo. If I look at the out put of xwininfo -root -children right before that, I see that about 80% of the windows have no name.

Also, if I run xrestop, I get a whole bunch of "<unknown>" resources with no associated PID (218 of them at the moment). The other 38 are actual windows I have open.