On Sat, 29 Nov 2008, David Laight wrote:
Oh come on, a program that routinely requires 64 simultaneous open files before even doing anything, is a wasteful resource hog and not worth the magnetic domains it is stored in.
With the possible exception of Opera. Not what I'd call a resource hog, but it hits the disk cache pretty damn hard when starting up. Then again, perhaps not everyone routinely has 100+ tabs sessions going..
Shells usually set both the soft and hard limits - so once changed the number can't be increased again.
So *that's* what's going on! I have been wondering about this for a while, but never really figured out why sometimes I could only change the limits via sysctl.
(For completeness, it is proc.<pid>.rlimit.descriptors.{soft,hard} that would be the relevant variables here. And (all Bourne compatible?) shells have the "ulimit -n" builtin that changes the limits for all processes started by that particular shell instance.)
MAgnus