On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 11:01:19AM +0200, Christopher Zimmermann wrote: > Hi, I got another question regarding this matter. > How is the openfile count accounted for? Is it per process, per > user, per shell? How does this work? > > I recently had problems when running rtorrent, which used about 100 > file descriptors (sockets). Pjsua then failed with "Too many open > files" (sockets, too), although it should not use more then three > sockets. > > I also once increased openfile-cur to 1024 for one shell, started an > appilcation using many sockets (>200) and then applications on other > shells with openfile-cur=128 would fail. > > > > Christopher
There is an overall system limit, set with sysctl kern.maxfiles=n, current in-use fds can be displayed with sysctl kern.nfiles. There is also a per-process limit. Processes inherit the limits from the parent process, but can change the lmits via system calls (with restrictions for non-seuperuser processes). Reading what you described above, it looks like you hit the system-wide limit. -Otto