I have a system where it looks like it is running out of file handles while executing a large computation program. At least Google'ing error I found in my /var/log/messages file:
kernel: Unable to load interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.2
found that the likely answer was the file handles shortage.

The current file-max I have is 4096. My system has 128 MB of RAM and 136 MB of swap. I was wondering if y'all thought I'd be safe in increasing the file-max. I'd like to double that at least.

Any opinions?

Also noteworthy - after that error above appears, my inetd dies with signal 11. Then ypbind stops working. Anybody have any suggestions?

I managed to increase the number of filehandles for a database server, but it's tricky - the kernel change is trivial, just edit include/linux/fs.h, make clean and rebuild.

However, the glibc has its own version of that definition, and at compile time sets the lengths of some arrays. You need to rebuild the glibc for yourself after making the corresponding change. I recall that it took me a while.

My kernel came with 8192 preset, by the way.

Hope it helps,
Martin