[Mailman-Users] (no subject)

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 4 Apr 2000 09:34:11 -0700  
Herman Knief <hknief at auctionwatch.com> wrote:

> One problem that you may be running into is file descriptors.  If
> you're running a stock RedHat kernel, you run out of fd's at some
> ridiculously low number (I think 1024).  There are some published
> docs on increasing the number of file descriptors and and the
> default number of open files allowed per process, which is
> something that I have done on my systems. 

My experience is that the 1024 filehandle limit is not a problem,
and that the _system_wide_ limit (usually 4096) was my problem here
(I have SMTP_MAX_RCPTS set to 10 in Defaults.py and have some fairly
large lists resulting in large spool bombs and explosions of queue
runners).  For recent kernels (probably anything in the 2.2.*
series, I know this works for 2.2.10), do a:

  echo 8192 > /proc/sys/fs/file-max

as per Documentation/proc.txt in your kernel sources:

--<cut>--
file-nr and file-max
   The kernel allocates file handles dynamically, but as yet
   doesn't free them again.

   The value in file-max denotes the maximum number of file handles
   that the Linux kernel will allocate. When you get a lot of error
   messages about running out of file handles, you might want to raise
   this limit. The default value is 4096. To change it, just write the
   new number into the file:

   # cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max
   4096
   # echo 8192 > /proc/sys/fs/file-max
   # cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max
   8192

   This method of revision is useful for all customizable parameters
   of the kernel - simply echo the new value to the corresponding
   file.
  
   The three values in file-nr denote the number of allocated file
   handles, the number of used file handles, and the maximum number of
   file handles. When the allocated file handles come close to the
   maximum, but the number of actually used ones is far behind, you've
   encountered a peak in your usage of file handles and you don't need
   to increase the maximum.

   However, there is still a per process limit of open files, which
   unfortunatly can't be changed that easily. It is set to 1024 by
   default. To change this you have to edit the files limits.h and
   fs.h in the directory /usr/src/linux/include/linux. Change the
   definition of NR_OPEN and recompile the kernel.
--<cut>--

-- 
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                              Other: coder at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--