This would be caused by the use of very low intervals, as you mentioned (causing ping probes to be consumed at a fast rate) in combination with lost packets at one or more remote hops (causing the probes to not be freed soon enough). 10 seconds at 100 probes per second does not leave sufficient margin for the default limit of 1024 probes.
Assuming you don't need to differentiate a lost ping packet from a reply that was received much later than expected, use the -Z option to shorten the timeout so that the probes are freed up faster. The default is 10 seconds (defined in ui/mtr.c as ctl->probe_timeout). If you *do* need to differentiate, I would adjust the limit for the number of outstanding probes in packet/probe.h, and then recompile: #define MAX_PROBES 1024 However, that's not enough - I believe the intent of this limit is to match the default Linux limit of 1024 open files per process, which you will need to override in /etc/security/limits.conf to make effective use of the new limit in your copy of mtr. Probably the best long-term fix would be to automatically free the oldest probe when the newest one is requested, but I don't know how practical that would be. On 3/13/20 2:37 PM, Marc Lehmann wrote: > Package: mtr-tiny > Version: 0.92-2 > Severity: normal > > Dear Maintainer, > > recent versions of mtr started to crash seemingly randomly with the > following message: > > mtr: Probes exhausted > > and an exit status of 1. It's not consistently reproducible, but I found > that when specifying a low interval, e.g. > > mtr -i 0.01 target > > it happens much more often than with the default interval. > > This might not be new. However, I use mtr daily for many years, and also > with low intervals, and have never seen this message until recently, so I > assume this is new behaviour. > > -- System Information: > Debian Release: 10.3 > APT prefers stable > APT policy: (990, 'stable'), (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, > 'testing-debug'), (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-debug'), (500, > 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental-debug'), (1, 'experimental') > Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) > Foreign Architectures: i386, x32 > > Kernel: Linux 5.4.24-050424-generic (SMP w/8 CPU cores) > Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_OOT_MODULE, > TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE > Locale: LANG=en_DK.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_DK.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), > LANGUAGE=en_DK.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) > Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash > Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) > LSM: AppArmor: enabled > > Versions of packages mtr-tiny depends on: > ii libc6 2.28-10 > ii libncurses6 6.1+20181013-2+deb10u2 > ii libtinfo6 6.1+20181013-2+deb10u2 > > mtr-tiny recommends no packages. > > mtr-tiny suggests no packages. > > -- no debconf information
