In message <20020620220318.9B1057E04@beowulf.gw.com>Christos Zoulas writes
>On Jun 20,  2:42pm, jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU (Jonathan Stone) wrote:
>-- Subject: Re: Time to bump the default open files limit?
>
>What's wrong with checking EMFILE and ENFILE?

You need to have planned to check for it.  Our codebase (any of the
*bsd's, for that matter) does not make that particularly easy.

Further, imagine you hit the limit on the shared file table.  How do
you track which processes are currently hogging open files, or track
the dynamic usage patterns over time?  In the end, I gave up and
configured a kernel with MAXUSERS=2048, or something equally overconfigured.

Christos, I'm not asking for significant effort here. I'm just
agreeing with Jason's experience: the ensuing errors aren't terribly
obvious, and can be frustrating to track down.  I found very modest
additions to tools /proc did help. But I dont know how that would
affect other users (scripts, parsers, emul-compat issues...)
of those tools.