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I wrote a small program that opens a bunch of files and played with open files limit on Ubuntu(as root). I was surprised to see that only user-level limits had effect on max number of files open.

I added this in /etc/security/limits.conf:

root hard nofile 30000
root soft nofile 30000

And set /proc/sys/fs/file-max to 20000 (sysctl -w fs.file-max=20000).

I then ran my program to open 29000 files without any problems.

Why does not system-level setting have any effect in this case?

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  • Have you restarted/started a new session after modifying limits.conf ?
    – BatchyX
    May 17, 2013 at 14:05
  • @BatchyX Yep, I did
    – snovo
    May 17, 2013 at 14:40

1 Answer 1

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I figured it out, to recap -

user-level limits on Linux are set in /etc/security/limits.conf (or under /limits.d dir)

system-level limits are set in /etc/sysctl.conf (immediately changed by a command like this: sysctl -w fs.file-max=20000)

In my initial test system-level limit of open files was ignored because I was running my program as root , so it was a privileged process and privileged processes on Linux bypass all kernel permission checks (http://linux.die.net/man/7/capabilities)

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