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I have a xen HVM vps and I'm trying to raise the hard and soft file limits for nobody at boot time. I'm using Ubuntu 10.04.3 and inside /etc/security/limits.conf I have:

nobody       soft    nofile   10000
nobody       hard    nofile  30000

But when I check the file limits are still the default 1024: 

su nobody -c 'ulimit -Hn'
1024
su nobody -c 'ulimit -Sn'
1024

What is the right way of raising the file limits for Ubuntu?

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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/etc/security/limits.conf file is processed by the pam_limits PAM module and is used to assign resource limits for a user session. These will be applied only when PAM and the pam_limits module is used during the session setup.

In your system the su utility may be not configured to use the pam_limits module (see the /etc/pam.d/su.conf file) or uses it only when creating a new login session (called with a -, -l or --login option).

Try using

su - nobody -c 'ulimit -Hn'

or adding

session     required    pam_limits.so

To /etc/pam.d/su or/and /etc/pam.d/su-l.

It may also be the case, that your su utility is not compiled with PAM support at all. In such case it will never use the limits.conf file.

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  • I tried using su - nobody -c 'ulimit -Hn' but it says 1024. What does this mean for the user nobody and nginx? That there aren't really any file limits and this tweak isn't necessary?
    – incognito2
    Oct 31, 2011 at 18:43
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    I ran into a similar problem when trying to run a service (JBoss) on Ubuntu 10.04 as a non-root user and getting lots of "too many open files" exceptions. I had already increased the nofiles limit which was verified with a normal login shell but it was not taking effect for any services started as a non-root user via su in an init script. I found that "su --login" still didn't pick up the increased nofiles limit even though pam_limits was uncommented in /etc/pam.d/login. I had to uncomment the pam_limits line in /etc/pam.d/su before it worked. It seems to me that /etc/pam.d/su applies to "su -
    – Paul Homes
    Mar 11, 2012 at 0:16

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