Question

I need more than 9990 file descriptors produced by timerfd_create for an event based application and get an EMFILE “too many open files”.

So I adapted the usual parameters and limitations:

sys.fs.file-max is 1000000 so the system wide limit should not be an issue. sys.fs.nr_open is 1048576 so my comparatively large value of file-max should still be considered valid. The per user limits in limits.conf is 1000000 and this is confirmed by ulimit -n which shows 1000000.

What am I missing ??

This is on a 2.6.32-5-amd64 kernel running inside a VirtualBox ontop of Windows XP on iCore 7.

EDIT: Embarassing. I link with some code which does a setrlimit of this value to a lower value…so I am lowering the per process limit myself. Discovered this by chance – may the hint be useful to others.

Answer 1

If you are using Linux then you can find a command named ulimit. There are several options might help you, such as:

max user processes              (-u) unlimited
virtual memory          (kbytes, -v) unlimited
file locks                      (-x) unlimited

So, ulimit -u will give you the power of running unlimited process for a specific user