system limits [Re: Workaround for Firefox crashiness]

[Andrew Doran <ad%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 12:31:58PM -0500, Jared D. McNeill wrote:

> If anybody has been annoyed like I have been about Firefox crashing 
> frequently with many tabs/windows open, I've found a workaround after 
> digging through a 70MB ktrace.
> 
> Basically, firefox runs out of file descriptors and freaks out. Maybe 
> it's a side effect of having lots of fonts installing from pkgsrc, I'm 
> not sure. In any case, bumping openfiles before launching firefox has 
> made the problem disappear for me.
> 
> ksh:
>  $ ulimit -n 512
>  $ firefox
> 
> or login.conf:
> 
>  default:\
>       :openfiles-cur=512:
> 
> Has made things work much smoother for me.

Nice catch. We inherited the default per-user limit (64) from 386BSD. I
think we should at least double it.

FWIW, I cranked maxusers for x86 so the default system-wide file and process
limit should be ~doubled now.

Also, for about a month or two now root's max process limit has been
enforced. I'm not sure why the change was made but with a default limit of
150 many systems will break instantly if upgraded to 5.0. This should be
upped to a more reasonable default, say 500?

Thoughts?

Andrew