How do I change the number of open files limit in Linux

Question

When running my application I sometimes get an error about too many files open   Running ulimit -a reports that the limit is 1024   How do I increase the limit above 1024     Edit ulimit -n 2048 results in a permission error

User · Answer

1  Add the following line to  etc security limits conf  webuser hard nofile 64000   then login as webuser  su - webuser   2  Edit following two files for webuser  append  bashrc and  bash profile file by running  echo  ulimit -n 64000   gt  gt   bashrc   echo  ulimit -n 64000   gt  gt   bash profile   3  Log out  then log back in and verify that the changes have been made correctly     ulimit -a   grep open open files                       -n  64000   Thats it and them boom  boom boom

User · Answer

If you are using Linux and you got the permission error  you will need to raise the allowed limit in the  etc limits conf or  etc security limits conf file  where the file is located depends on your specific Linux distribution     For example to allow anyone on the machine to raise their number of open files up to 10000 add the line to the limits conf file      hard nofile 10000  Then logout and relogin to your system and you should be able to do   ulimit -n 10000   without a permission error

User · Answer

You could always try doing a ulimit -n 2048   This will only reset the limit for your current shell and the number you specify must not exceed the hard limit  Each operating system has a different hard limit setup in a configuration file   For instance  the hard open file limit on Solaris can be set on boot from  etc system   set rlim fd max   166384 set rlim fd cur   8192   On OS X  this same data must be set in  etc sysctl conf   kern maxfilesperproc 166384 kern maxfiles 8192   Under Linux  these settings are often in  etc security limits conf   There are two kinds of limits    soft limits are simply the currently enforced limits hard limits mark the maximum value which cannot be exceeded by setting a soft limit   Soft limits could be set by any user while hard limits are changeable only by root  Limits are a property of a process  They are inherited when a child process is created so system-wide limits should be set during the system initialization in init scripts and user limits should be set during user login for example by using pam limits   There are often defaults set when the machine boots   So  even though you may reset your ulimit in an individual shell  you may find that it resets back to the previous value on reboot   You may want to grep your boot scripts for the existence ulimit commands if you want to change the default

User · Answer

If some of your services are balking into ulimits  it s sometimes easier to put appropriate commands into service s init-script  For example  when Apache is reporting      alert   11 Resource temporarily unavailable  apr thread create  unable to create worker thread   Try to put ulimit -s unlimited into  etc init d httpd  This does not require a server reboot

[linux] How do I change the number of open files limit in Linux?

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