tl;dr set both the soft and hard limits
I'm sure it's working as intended but I'll add it here just in case. For completeness the limit is set here (see below for syntax): /etc/security/limits.conf
some_user soft nofile 60000
some_user hard nofile 60000
and activated with the following in /etc/pam.d/common-session:
session required pam_limits.so
If you set only the hard limit, ulimit -a
will show the default (1024):
If you set only the soft the limit ulimit -a will show (4096)
If you set them both ulimit -a
will show the soft limit (up to the hard limit of course)