Hello All, Can anyone point me to a good primer on the top of UNIX file descriptors? We had an issue with them recently at work on a SunOS 5.8 host and we upped the limit from 1024 to 4096 via the /etc/system file. There was some debate as to whether or not it was a good idea. My Google searches implied it *might* not be a good idea in some circumstances but I found no obvious conclusions. I know what they are - I just want to understand the pros and cons of changing the default limit...and why there are limits in the first place. Thank you for any help! -- Gary
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 08:23:35 -0400 (EDT) From: Gary Hanley <gary@hanley.net> Can anyone point me to a good primer on the top of UNIX file descriptors? We had an issue with them recently at work on a SunOS 5.8 host and we upped the limit from 1024 to 4096 via the /etc/system file. There was some debate as to whether or not it was a good idea. My Google searches implied it *might* not be a good idea in some circumstances but I found no obvious conclusions. I know what they are - I just want to understand the pros and cons of changing the default limit...and why there are limits in the first place. I once had an odd problem with Acrobat Reader because of something like this; it was an older version of it with some older version of Linux. The problem was that if the file descriptor limit was higher than a certain number the reader would crash on startup. Running strace on it showed that it went through and tried to close all open file descriptors up to the limit; presumably (since this is closed source) there was some kind of hard coded array in there. -- Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu> Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net Project lead for Gimp Print -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton
On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Robert L Krawitz wrote:
I once had an odd problem with Acrobat Reader because of something like this; it was an older version of it with some older version of Linux. The problem was that if the file descriptor limit was higher than a certain number the reader would crash on startup. Running strace on it showed that it went through and tried to close all open file descriptors up to the limit; presumably (since this is closed source) there was some kind of hard coded array in there.
Our problem is with some Java-based apps. It seems Java can easily have problems with too many open files if not coded properly. I'm not a Java programmer but that's the conclusion I'm drawing. -- Gary
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Robert L Krawitz