Re: Too many open files in system for gnome

[Dan Mueth <dan eazel com>]

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.

Dan