[RFC] Increase default ulimit nofile

Joe Nall joe at nall.com
Thu May 21 12:57:46 UTC 2009


On May 21, 2009, at 12:49 AM, Jon Masters wrote:

> Folks,
>
> While digging through a fault in GNOME and Rhythmbox this evening, I
> happened upon this nugget. By default, we're still living in 1970:
>
> [jcm at tonnant ~]$ ulimit -n
> 1024
>
> Now. This might be great for a honking great shared UNIX server from  
> the
> days of yore, but it's not remotely appropriate for a modern desktop.
> Especially not one layered with so many per-user daemons and layers of
> abstraction as we have on modern Linux systems.
>
> I suggest /etc/security/limits.conf be modified to include something
> like the following, along with advice for sysadmins:
>
> * - nofile 8192
>
> Discuss.
>
> --- background to discovering this problem ---
>
> I like podcasts. A lot. I also like rhythmbox (mostly). I've been
> wondering recently why I would occasionally not be able to download
> podcasts in rhythmbox. It seemed to be related to when I was connected
> to a particular VPN and so I had dismissed it as being network DNSness
> weirdness. But then it started happening much more often. Tonight, I
> decided it was probably more than occasional network weirdness.
>
> So I decided "I'll just fire up gdb on rhythmbox". Many debuginfo
> packages, cscopes, hacked up source, etc. later on, I discover the
> "problem" is in abstraction layer number 2 - totem-pl-parser. So I
> download the source to this package also, rebuild and hack it up. I
> eventually discovered that various GError objects were happily telling
> me that the maximum number of open files had been exceeded, but totem
> never exposes this to rhythmbox, and the latter just has no idea what
> the heck is causing it to fail. Some serious fail happening there.

Isn't that like putting a bigger gas tank on your Hummer? Did you file  
a bz on the file descriptor leak in totem-pl-parser?

joe





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