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Date: Tue, 22 Apr 1997 15:18:19 -0700 (PDT)
From: Doug White <dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu>
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Reply-To: Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu>
To: Robert Watson <robert@fledge.watson.org>
cc: questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: File Table full
In-Reply-To: <335CD09E.ADE05CAC@fledge.watson.org>
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On Tue, 22 Apr 1997, Robert Watson wrote:

> Yesterday afternoon, I got this kernerl message/etc in my messages:
> 
> Apr 21 12:08:56 fledge syslogd: /dev/console: Too many open files in
> system: Too
>  many open files in system
> Apr 21 12:08:56 fledge /kernel: file: table is full
> Apr 21 12:09:18 fledge last message repeated 3 times
> Apr 21 12:10:31 fledge last message repeated 3 times
> Apr 21 12:16:55 fledge su: robert to root on /dev/ttyp2
> 
> I currently have maxusers=128 in my kernel config -- can I explicitely
> increase file handles on the system, or should I just increase maxusers?
> Does maxusers change the file descriptor table size?

Not really.  You want to probably tweak CHILD_MAX and OPEN_MAX.  

>From 2.2.1 LINT:

#
# Under some circumstances it is convenient to increase the defaults
# for the maximum number of processes per user and the maximum number
# of open files files per user.  E.g., (1) in a large news server, user
# `news' may need more than 100 concurrent processes.  (2) a user may
# need lots of windows under X.  In both cases, it may be inconvenient
# to start all the processes from a parent whose soft rlimit on the
# number of processes is large enough.  The following options work by
# changing the soft rlimits for init.
#
options         CHILD_MAX=128
options         OPEN_MAX=128

Doug White                              | University of Oregon  
Internet:  dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu    | Residence Networking Assistant
http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite    | Computer Science Major