file descriptor leak in 64-bit 2.6.8?

[Diane Jaquay <djaquay@yahoo.com>]

Are there known problems with file descriptor leaks in 2.6.8 running on an
Athlon 64?

The details: I recently ran out of file descriptors (got a line in
/var/log/messages of "kernel: VFS: file-max limit 203424 reached", also "Too
many open files in system" when running various commands not as root).  lsof |
wc reported around 4000 files in use, which, (while I understand that lsof
won't match file-nr due to maps, etc.), still struck me as odd to have an
orders-of-magnatude difference between the two numbers.

I then started shutting things down.  Nothing caused file-nr to shrink by more
than a few hundred.  Eventually, I rebooted, and started logging file-nr.  

Seems that the number of allocated descriptors grows steadily, even though
process-wise, not much is running on the box (just Apache and Postgres).  After
14 days uptime, I'm up to 65235 descriptors allocated per file-nr, and lsof |
wc reporting 2813.  The lsof number is fairly stable, while file-nr has
steadily grown.

Box details:

SuSE 9.2 running stock kernel: 2.6.8-24.11-default
/proc/cpuinfo says "AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+"

Clues most welcome,
Dave