Too many open files on Debian 6

flocntl · 08-01-2012, 07:52 AM

Hello,

I'm having some difficulties with setting up a correct ulimit and I hope you can help me. I am running a tomcat server via jsvc and hence thought that configuring the ulimit for my 'tomcat' user would be the right way to go.

/etc/security/limits.conf

Code:

tomcat           soft    nofile          400000
tomcat           hard    nofile          400000

/etc/pam.d/login

Code:

session    required    pam_limits.so

All seems fine:

Code:

$ su - tomcat
$ ulimit -n
400000

But when I start the tomcat server and my application runs the lucene file indexer, I get a "too many open files" exception, although I'm sure that it doesn't index/open nearly as many files as the ulimit value is set to. For debugging, I also ran an lsof Script every few seconds, printing out the open file counts of all processes. It showed JSVC with a max of 1700 at any time, with all other processes using way less, as expected:

Code:

lsof -n | awk '{ print $1,$3 }' | grep -E '^[a-z]+' | sort | uniq -c |sort -n >> $file

Thanks in advance

kbp · 08-02-2012, 01:07 AM

Check your startup script, it may be resetting limits - it's also possible that ulimit settings are not coming through if you're su'ing to tomcat.

flocntl · 08-02-2012, 02:21 AM

Thanks, but I've written the init script myself. When I login directly as tomcat user, the ulimit is correct also.

I have installed tomcat from source. Could it be, that I need to configure anything else pam related?