Help needed with Solaris file descriptor problem

[Kevin Spicer]

On Tue, 2003-08-19 at 21:28, Adrian Barker wrote:

>This afternoon we started seeing 'too many open files'
>error messages in the syslog, and our mailscanner
>will not process any more emails. Does anyone know
>what has to be done to fix the problem on Solaris 8 ?
>There was a similar question on the mailing list last
>July, but not an answer. Any help would be appreciated
>because we now have many tens of thousands of stuck
>emails. We are running MailScanner 4.21-9 with Sophos
>and Spamassasin.

Couple of things to try (you may need to do both of them)..
change (in check_mailscanner)

ulimit -n 2000 >/dev/null 2>&1

to

ulimit -n unlimited >/dev/null 2>&1



(You might also put that line in the MailScanner init script)

The following was also suggested previously by Julian (his warning
too...!)

Add the following to /etc/system and reboot

* rlim_fd_max = system-wide file descriptors limit
* rlim_fd_cur = per-user    file descriptors limit
* Default values are 256 per user and 1024 globally, which is
* far too small for MailScanner, which can use 1000 on its own.
set rlim_fd_max=16384
set rlim_fd_cur=8192

BTW Make sure you get that change exactly right, or your machine won't
boot







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