[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#1110748: pkexec takes a long time when `ulimit -n` is high

[Colin Fletcher]

Package: pkexec
Version: 126-2
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

I've just upgraded to trixie, and noticed that synaptic-pkexec & pkexec
took a very long time to start up. By stracing pkexec, I found that it
was taking a very long time attempting to close many invalid file
descriptors.

/etc/security/limits.d/nofile.conf had:
@audio   -  nofile     unlimited

The solution is probably "don't do that, then": I do appreciate that
setting 'nofile unlimited' is maybe a bad idea. I've not seen a problem
like this before updating to trixie, though, so I'm filing this bug just
in case anyone else has done the same stupid thing as me and notices
that synaptic-pkexec (and other things) take a very long time to start 
up and wonders why.

colinf at colinf-xps15:~$ ulimit -n
1073741816
colinf at colinf-xps15:~$ time pkexec echo "hi"
hi

real    1m49.300s
user    0m37.384s
sys     1m9.203s
colinf at colinf-xps15:~$ ulimit -n 1024
colinf at colinf-xps15:~$ time pkexec echo "hi"
hi

real    0m2.938s
user    0m0.007s
sys     0m0.010s
colinf at colinf-xps15:~$


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 13.0
   APT prefers stable-updates
   APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 
'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 6.12.38+deb13-amd64 (SMP w/16 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_OOT_MODULE, 
TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE 
not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages pkexec depends on:
ii  libc6                  2.41-12
ii  libglib2.0-0t64        2.84.3-1
ii  libpam0g               1.7.0-5
ii  libpolkit-agent-1-0    126-2
ii  libpolkit-gobject-1-0  126-2
ii  polkitd                126-2

pkexec recommends no packages.

pkexec suggests no packages.

Versions of packages pkexec is related to:
pn  elogind         <none>
pn  libpam-elogind  <none>
ii  libpam-systemd  257.7-1
ii  systemd         257.7-1

-- no debconf information
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