kernel: VFS: file-max limit 4096 reached

(Last modified: 29May2006)

This document (10100119) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

symptom

Error Too many open files in system

fact

Novell Open Enterprise Server (OES) - Linux

note

Troubleshooting notes:

Error messages in the /var/log messages, /var/log/warn, etc, about too many open files in system, file-max limit reached

cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max --> this will tell you how many open file descriptors you may have open. In this case the settings was "4096"
cat/proc./sys/fs/file-nr --> this will tell you how many current open file descriptors you currently have

To see what process has open file descriptors, do the following: (for this example, we will use the namcd service)

SD-6:/# ps -ea | grep namcd
28354 ? 00:00:17 namcd

After getting the PID for the namcd process, which was 28354, change to the /proc/pid#/fd directory. For example:
SD-6:/ # cd /proc/28354/fd

Next, do an ls, which will show the number of file descriptors being used.
SD-6:/proc/28354/fd # ls
. .. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

If there are many of them, you can use ls | wc -l to count the number of file descriptors.
SD-6:/proc/28354/fd # ls | wc -l
11

change

The /etc/sysctl.conf file had been edited for troubleshooting purposes and the line "fs.file-max = 4096" had been set

fix

Edited the /etc/sysctl.conf and removed the "fs.file-max = 4096" line out of the file.

document

Document Title:	kernel: VFS: file-max limit 4096 reached
Document ID:	10100119
Solution ID:	NOVL104773
Creation Date:	10Jan2006
Modified Date:	29May2006
Novell Product Class:	Linux

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