[ale] practical file-max limits?

Eric Z. Ayers eric.ayers at mindspring.com
Sat Oct 27 14:50:48 EDT 2001


We routinely run with 10,000 files on our servers.  I thought that the 
default with the 2.2 kernels was 4096, but I'm probably wrong.

echo 10000 >/proc/sys/fs/file-max

On a big server, setting 50,000 files doesn't sound unreasonable to me.

-Eric.

jenn at colormaria.com wrote:
> I've got a mail server that can potentially get 10,000 or more simultaneous
> delivery requests (not often, but I did crash it last night trying to
> deliver to 8000 users at once).  My file-max limit is set at 8192, which is
> standard default at least on RedHat boxen.
> 
> I read on linuxdoc.org that "We generally tune this file to improve the
> number of open files by increasing the value of /proc/sys/fs/file-max to
> something reasonable like 256 for every 4M of RAM we have"
> 
> I've got 896MB RAM in this machine.  Which, following linuxdoc's equation,
> results in:
> 896/4 = 224*256 = 57344
> 
> That's a substantial increase in number of available open files.  Is this
> sane?  Anyone ever done this?  Any considerations other than RAM that I
> should be aware of?
> 
> TIA
> jenn
> 
> 
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