[mdlug] Help: Changing open file limits on Ubuntu 8.04

[Michael]

Hey all;
I am at my wits end on this problem on one of my Web servers that also hosts
my NFS mounts. I am asking here out of last resort because my Google-fu has
failed me.

It appears as though I am running out of available open file descriptors.
The current set up is only allowing 1024. My big user: www-data is also
under the same limits. This is causing quite a bit of latency on the server,
which might come under quite a bit of load.

So far, I have made sure to place in /etc/security/limits.conf:


*   hard    nofile  65536
*   soft    nofile  65536


I also updated sysctl.conf:


fs.file-max = 65536


After sysctl -p I can

$ cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max
65536


but ulimit -n still reads 1024. And trying to set it leads to errors:

$ ulimit -n 65536
-bash: ulimit: open files: cannot modify limit: Operation not permitted


In the end I really need this increased for all users, including the
www-data process. I am really having difficulty here.

Thanks for any help,

Michael