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

[Aaron Kulkis]

Michael wrote:
>>
>> ulimit applies ONLY to the current shell, and all child
>> (grandchild, etc.) processes.  It does not effect sibling,
>> parent, cousin, aunt, etc. processes
>>
> 
> So how would one up the number of available open files for www-data, which
> is only being used by nginx? I could really care less about the shell.

But all processes that you run are children of some shell or another.

The simplest solution is up the limits in the file you mentioned
in /etc, and then reboot the machine.  This will start init
with higher ulimits, and give all children similarly high limits.

> 
> I have done the PAM and ssh stuffs mentioned earlier.
> 
> I also have hard rebooted (granted it was 190 days ago) and didn't get
> anywhere, but if we think it would work after the changes that I have made,
> I guess I am willing to give it a try.
> 
> The symptoms of the issue appear are slow reads and writes to the nfs
> drives, Empty files sometimes being returned and an error in the Nginx logs,
> which read "Too many open files" despite the settings for nginx which has
> the file limits at a huge number.


See above