limits.conf: howto set core file size?

[Matt Roth]

Patrick wrote:

 > Thanks for the information. I was thinking about the login you
 > mentioned. The primary application I need this for is Asterisk. Like
 > apache it is started as root and by passing -U <user> -G <group>
 > parameters it will run as that <user>/<group> (asterisk/asterisk in my
 > case). Do I still need to add the info to the initscript or do I add it
 > to limits.conf?

I run a large scale Asterisk system on Fedora Core 3.  I had a problem 
where the default number of file descriptors wasn't adequate for the 
number of socket connections that were being opened.  Suffice it to say 
that I learned the information I'm passing on about ulimit and 
limits.conf the hard way.  I make all ulimit changes in the init script 
AND limits.conf.  That way they're applied in both of the following 
scenarios:

1) Asterisk is started automatically at boot.
2) Asterisk is started manually from a login prompt after a crash or 
maintenance downtime.

If you're planning on having a large number of concurrent calls, you 
should increase the maximum number of file descriptors so that you don't 
run into the same problem I did.  This can be done by adding the 
following lines to limits.conf:

<user>   soft   nofile   65536
<user>   hard   nofile   65536

And adding the following line to Asterisk's init script, prior to 
starting Asterisk itself:

ulimit -n 65536

If security isn't a major issue, I'd recommend running Asterisk as 
root.  There is a substantial amount of work involved in setting all of 
the permissions to run it properly as another user.

Here are a couple of scripts that you can use for starting Asterisk at 
boot and restarting it automatically if it crashes:

<http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/branches/1.2/contrib/init.d/rc.redhat.asterisk?rev=15615&view=markup>
<http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/branches/1.2/contrib/scripts/safe_asterisk?rev=21638&view=markup>

I'd be happy to continue helping you with your system, but we're getting 
a little off topic.  I'm also an active member of the Asterisk users 
list <http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users>, so I'll 
keep an eye out for your posts over there.  Feel free to contact me off 
list as well.

Matthew Roth
InterMedia Marketing Solutions
Software Engineer and Systems Developer