5.2.11 I reached the limit on the number of opened files (error message)
The latest versions of Linux kernel implement a dynamic limit on the maximum number of opened files.
With an older system, you can increase the limit on the number of opened files using the /proc file system. This file system is entirely virtual--it is just a "window" to see or set some parts of the Linux kernel. To read the maximum number of simultaneously opened files on my system, I use the following command:
cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max
On my system (Mandrake 7.2), the limit is 8192. To increase it, I use (as root):
echo 16000 > /proc/sys/fs/file-max
You may also want to increase the limit on a related kernel variable:
echo 30000 > /proc/sys/fs/inode-max
To make the changes permanent, add the above lines at the end of your startup script /etc/rc.d/rc.local
To find out how many files are currently opened on my running system, I may run (as root):
/usr/sbin/lsof |wc -l
This runs a utility that lists opened files ("lsof") and pipes the output to a utility wordcount ("wc") telling it to count lines of output (option "-l").
To learn more about the /proc Linux kernel interface, the meaning of the variables it contains, and their recommended values, you may wish to read (if you installed the Linux kernel source codes, which is a great resource even for a newbie):
less /usr/src/linux/Documentation/proc.txt
or (on RedHat 8.0)
man proc
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