Re: Too many open files in system for gnome

[Dan Mueth <dan eazel com>]

On Fri, 30 Mar 2001, Dan Mueth wrote:

> 
> On Fri, 30 Mar 2001, Diego Restrepo wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > After install the latest pre release of gnome 1.4,  my system start to get
> > unstable when certain number of processes are reached. 
> > 
> > For example: nautilus+powershell+xmms+kmail+emacs+galeon
> > 
> > After this all stop work and the following message appear, e.g when
> > try xemacs
> > 
> > bash: /usr/bin/xemacs: Too many open files in system
> > 
> > My computer is  a PII, 128M and  Red Hat 6.0.
> > 
> > 
> > Any idea of what process is causing the problem?
> 
> Hi Diego,
> 
> I'm not sure why GNOME 1.4 is opening more files than GNOME 1.2 did.  I
> guess because it is better ;)
> 
> To see how many open files you can have: cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max
> 
> To increase this number, say to 11264, use: 
>     echo 11264 > /proc/sys/fs/file-max
> 
> You probably want to stick this at the bottom of your /etc/rc.d/rc.local
> file so you never have to think about it again.
> 
> You can also change the default by changing NR_FILE and NR_OPEN in the
> kernel and rebuilding, if you want to do it the hard way.

Sorry to reply to myself - I just realized I didn't quite answer your
question.  To find out what files are open and what applications have them
open, use /usr/sbin/lsof.  Then you can tell us which process is opening
so many files :)

Dan