I've done a bit of poking on the server and ulimit doesn't seem to be the problem:e2wiki:~$ ulimit unlimited e2wiki:~$ cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max 170355
try: ulimit -n ulimit on its own is something else. On my machine I get: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ ulimit unlimited [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max 364770 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ ulimit -n 1024 I have to run: ulimit -n 20000 to get lucene to run w/ a large index...