Too many open files

[Brian K. White]

On 10/1/2010 9:42 AM, Nancy Palmquist wrote:
>    I am getting an error like this occasionally on filePro 5.0 - Linux.
>
> Too many filePro files open at once.
> Maximum is 60.
>
> Standard Input Redirected
>
>
> *** A filePro Error Has Occurred ***
>
> File Table Full
>
> On File:
>
> PRMESSG : Cannot Open /var/appl/fp/lib/errmsg
> errno is 0
>    : Success
>
> filePro Error Number: 13
>
> Standard Input Redirected
>
> Is there a parameter that can be changed to give filepro more room?
>
> PFFILES is what I went for but it says windows only in the manual.
>
> Nancy
>
>



What distribution and version of linux?

There are a lot of possible layers and mechanisms to impose such limits 
and they are all different from one distribution to another and one 
version to another, so it's impractical to start guessing without at 
least a known likely starting point of some particular distribution and 
version so we can google up that versions defaults and quirks and start 
from there.

(for instance using a stock opensuse install I never set anything having 
to do with open file limits and I never run into this, but it's just 
because of the way opensuse happens to set it's defaults, and certain 
accounting and quotas packages which I do not install. If I ever did hit 
this problem, the way to fix it wouldn't be the same on a centos or a 
debian box.)

60 is a very small number so it sounds like a per process or per user 
limit, because the system wide kernel limit is usually a minimum of 8096 
and that is considered way too low, 65535, 131000 or 200000 are more 
sensible.
http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/kerneltuning.htm

All that said, the simplest and first thing to check is ulimit. "ulimit 
-n" shows the max open files allowed for the current user. Run just 
"ulimit" as the user, and as filepro, and root. Do any of those show any 
files limit or all unlimited?

How you would change these if they are too limited depends of the 
distribution. Probably there is some files in /etc that get included in 
the users environment, or the overall servers startup environment, and 
probably those files get edited by some distribution-specific admin utility.

-- 
bkw