Re: Re: Too many open files (was Re: spinlock problems reported earlier)

* Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> [001223 14:16] wrote:
> Department of Things that Fell Through the Cracks:
>
> Back in August we had concluded that it is a bad idea to trust
> "sysconf(_SC_OPEN_MAX)" as an indicator of how many files each backend
> can safely open. FreeBSD was reported to return 4136, and I have
> since noticed that LinuxPPC returns 1024. Both of those are
> unreasonably large fractions of the actual kernel file table size.
> A few dozen backends opening hundreds of files apiece will fill the
> kernel file table on most Unix platforms.

getdtablesize(2) on BSD should tell you the per-process limit.
sysconf on FreeBSD shouldn't lie to you.

getdtablesize should take into account limits in place.

later versions of FreeBSD have a sysctl 'kern.openfiles' which
can be checked to see if the system is approaching the systemwide
limit.

--
-Alfred Perlstein - [bright(at)wintelcom(dot)net|alfred(at)freebsd(dot)org]
"I have the heart of a child; I keep it in a jar on my desk."