[Yanel-dev] too many open files problem on VMWare Ubuntu

[Michael Wechner]

Hi

In order to improve this it helps to find out which files are actually 
open, e.g.

Get Tomcat process ID: ps ax | grep tom
Display all open files: lsof -p PROCESS_ID_OF_TOMCAT
Display number of open files: lsof -p PROCESS_ID_OF_TOMCAT | wc -l

For example on my Mac I have approx. 173 open files currently under the 
tomcat process ID, whereas
most of them are the jar files.

Cheers

Michael



Am 23.07.11 11:05, schrieb Michael Wechner:
> On 4/1/11 1:06 PM, Michael Wechner wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> We are experiencing a "too many open files" problem on VMWare Ubuntu 
>> when running the lucene re-indexing, whereas this is done on a mac 
>> and if running the lucene re-indexing on Mac OS X everything is fine.
>
> It's odd that on Mac OS X it's fine although according to "ulimit -a" 
> one has
>
> open files                      (-n) 256
>
> whereas on "our" Linux we have
>
> open files                      (-n) 1024
>
> Well, one might argue that on the Linux system there might be other 
> processes "eating" these, but
> I couldn't see anything which would be much different than Mac OS X
>>
>> I could image that the VMWare Ubuntu is slow on the IO (because of 
>> the various layers) and hence a "queue" of open files is established 
>> which are not being closed fast enough and hence when the limit of 
>> Ubuntu is reached it will "crash".
>>
>> I guess we could increase this limit
>>
>> #su root
>> #ulmit -n 1000000
>
> An alternative might be to increase it for  a particular user:
>
> - sudo su root
> - vi /etc/security/limits.conf
> - Add the following lines (whereas 'wyona' should be replaced by the 
> users you are using):
> wyona           soft    nofile          10240
> wyona           hard    nofile          20480
> - exit
> - start a new shell for the particular user (e.g. 'wyona')
> - ulimit -a (should tell you that you now: open 
> files                      (-n) 10240
>
> This worked for us :-) (but still it would be nice if we wouldn't have 
> to do this in the first place)
>
> HTH
>
> Michael
>
>>
>> but I don't think that's really solving the problem.
>>
>> Anyway it's good to keep this in mind when using virtualization.
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Michael
>>
>>
>>
>