socket: Too many open files

[Shakti Kumar]

Hello,
I’m running a script which basically does a traceroute to the list of hosts
provided, and then pulls up some info by logging in to gateways in the path.
I am running this script for a list of almost 40k hosts in our data centers.
Also, I am using commands module to get the traceroute output.

out = commands.getstatusoutput('traceroute ' + ip)

However I observe that this particular line is failing with socket error
after I reach some 5k to 6k hosts.
I know commands module is using pipes to execute the given command and this
is one reason for exhaustion of file descriptors.
Any suggestions for improving this and getting a workaround?

Thanks,
Shakti