[tor-relays] log message: [WARN] Failing because we have X connections already.

[David S]

greetings!

i setup a new tor exit server and am seeing this in the log messages:

18:25:01 [WARN] Failing because we have 1352 connections already. Please 
read doc/TUNING for guidance. [11430 similar message(s) suppressed in 
last 21600 seconds]

any ideas why?

this is happening on a shared VPS, running ubuntu 16.04 and tor 
v0.2.8.8. i'm starting to think it's some limitation by the VPS provider.

uname -a shows a old kernel (possibly centos 6):

Linux km14133-25 2.6.32-042stab113.21 #1 SMP Wed Mar 23 11:05:25 MSK 
2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

i've made sure tor has enough "max open files" available via limits.conf:

# cat /proc/$(pgrep tor)/limits|grep "open files"
Max open files            65536                65536                files

i'm starting to scratch my head. maybe i should do some intense 
debugging on this box..

cheers,
david