What is file file descriptor?

[mateuszga]

Hi.

I have a problem with management serves, sometimes when I try to connect to firewall by SSH I can see message "Cannot connect to management server". Process restarts itselft and connection to mgmtsrvr return, mgmtsrvr return to normal resource utilization. 

I also had a problem with PBP, a lot of packets was blocked by PBP. 

The software version is 9.1.5, I found fix in 9.1.6:

PAN-132055
Fixed an issue where a process (mgmtsrvr) was unresponsive when the number of active file descriptors was greater than 1024.

Does anyone know what file descriptor is and how can I check it to eliminate that this is not a software problem?

[reaper · Accepted solution]

if you run the following command:

debug system process-info

you will get a list of all the management plane processes, and their resource usage

the 'FD' you see there are the file escriptors, at the bottom is the total sum of open descriptors

Total num processes: 54

Name                   PID      CPU%  FDs Open   Virt Mem     Res Mem      State     
all_task_4             4405     18    19         8243852      8144164      S         
...       
web_backend            4823     0     13         535412       39152        S         

Totals                         122   1045       131444472    108450212