Question

Need to “calculate” optimum ulimit and fs.file-max values according to my own server needs.
Please do not conflict with “how to set those limits in various Linux distros” questions.

I am asking:

1. Is there any good guide to explain in detail, parameters used for ulimit? (> 2.6 series kernels)
2. Is there any good guide to show fs.file-max usage metrics?

Actually there are some old reference i could find on the net:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/securing/chap6sec72.html
“something reasonable like 256 for every 4M of RAM we have: i.e. for a machine with 128 MB of RAM, set it to 8192 – 128/4=32 32*256=8192”

Any up to date reference is appreciated.

Answer 1

For fs.file-max, I think in almost all cases you can just leave it alone. If you are running a very busy server of some kind and actually running out of file handles, then you can increase it — but the value you need to increase it to will depend on exactly what kind of server you are running and what the load on it is. In general you would just need to increase it until you don’t run out of file handles any more, or until you realize you need more memory or more systems to handle the load. The gain from “tuning” things by reducing file-max below the default is so minimal as to not be worth thinking about — my phone works fine with an fs-max value of 83588.

By the way, the modern kernel already uses a rule of thumb to set file-max based on the amount of memory in the system; from fs/file_table.c in the 2.6 kernel:

    /*
     * One file with associated inode and dcache is very roughly 1K.
     * Per default don't use more than 10% of our memory for files. 
     */ 

    n = (mempages * (PAGE_SIZE / 1024)) / 10;
    files_stat.max_files = max_t(unsigned long, n, NR_FILE);

and files_stat.max_files is the setting of fs.file-max; this ends up being about 100 for every 1MB of ram.

ulimits of course are about limiting resources allocated by users or processes. If you have multiple users or another situation like that, then you can decide how you want to divide up system resources and limit memory use, number of processes, etc. The definitive guide to the details of the limits you can set is the setrlimit man page (and the kernel source, of course).