upgrading binary failed - execve - too long argument list

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Tue, Apr 27, 2021 at 12:35:58PM +0200, Charlie Kilo wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> i'm trying to upgrade an nginx-binary while running.
> When i do kill -s USR2 <pid>, i get the following error in the logs..
> 
> 11:40:38 [alert] 52701#0: execve() failed while executing new binary
> process "/opt/sbin/nginx" (7: Argument list too long)
> 
> Anybody knows what exactly is in those arguments ? We have ~ 20-55 worker
> processes if that might be related..
> nginx-version is 1.18.0, os: debian buster

The only notable thing I can think of is the list of open 
listening sockets, which is passed in the NGINX environment 
variable to the new process.

There should be plenty of space even with a lot of listening 
sockets though, given the default limit of 2M on Linux.  Even with 
"listen ... reuseport", when a separate listening socket 
is created for each worker process, it does not look like the 
limit can be easily reached: 2M should be enough for about 300k 
listening sockets, so with 55 worker processes it is about 5k 
listening sockets with reuseport.

How many listening sockets do you have?  Do they use "listen ...  
reuseport" option?  What "getconf ARG_MAX" and "ulimit -s" show on 
your system?  Any 3rd party modules (and what "nginx -V" shows)?

-- 
Maxim Dounin
http://mdounin.ru/