On Wed, 2006-04-26 at 15:17 -0600, Lamont R. Peterson wrote:
* soft nofile 1024
* hard nofile 65535
Of course, set values that make sense for the soft limit, since unprivileged
users can't change that. On RHEL & FC, pam_limit.so is loaded
in /etc/pam.d/system-auth, so no modifications will be needed.
Why change the soft limit at all? Leave it be, and just do a ulimit -n
before starting the descriptor eating process. Also, * is probably
dangerous, put a specific username there. Or at least a group.
Azureus likes to eat file descriptors. (It seems to keep every file open
at all times on every active torrent. Ugh.) Its impossible to activate a
torrent with lots of small files unless you raise the limit. I raised my
hard limit in limits.conf, then I have a script that starts up Azureus
like this:
#!/bin/sh
ulimit -n 16384
cd ~/azureus
JAVA_PROGRAM_DIR="/usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.5.0-sun/bin/" \
exec nice -1 ./azureus
Works nice. Note that greatly raising a users descriptor limit opens the
possibility of a user or two running into the *kernel* descriptor limit,
which IIRC is set at compile time. I imagine this could cause a nasty
DoS situation. I've never tried it so I dunno...