November 2017
Intermediate to advanced
298 pages
7h 10m
English
In the same way that we have a maximum open file limit for sessions and processes, the kernel itself has a limit for the maximum open file descriptors across the whole system. If this limit is reached, no other files will be able to be opened, and thus this needs tweaking on machines that may have a large number of files open at any one time.
This value is part of the kernel parameters and as such can be seen with sysctl:
$ sysctl fs.file-maxfs.file-max = 757778
While on this machine the value seems reasonable, I have seen a few older distributions with a surprisingly low value that will get easily hit with errors if you are running a number of containers on the system.
Read now
Unlock full access