I am looking at the mlogger in the ALPHA anti-hydrogen experiment at CERN. It is 
mysteriously misbehaving during run start and stop.

The problem turns out to be with the select() system call.

The corresponding FD_SET(), FD_ISSET() & co operate on a an array of fixed size 
FD_SETSIZE, value 1024, in my case. But the socket number is 1409, so we overrun 
the FD_SET() array. Ouch.

I see that all uses of select() in midas have no protection against this.

(we should probably move away from select() to newer poll() or whatever it is)

Why does mlogger open so many file descriptors? The usual, scaling problems in the 
history. The old midas history does not reuse file descriptors, so opens the same 
3 history files (.hst, .idx, etc) for each history event. The new FILE history 
opens just one file per history event. But if the number of events is bigger than 
1024, we run into same trouble.

(BTW, the system limit on file descriptors is 4096 on the affected machine, 1024 
on some other machines, see "limit" or "ulimit -a").

K.O.