Friday 2 October 2009

Too many open files in Alfresco

Recently, my Alfresco installation on Centos 5.3 started to behave randomly and some functionalities became suddenly unavailable. A quick view in the error logs showed a pattern, a string of "too many open file" complaints.

The reason is that there is a limit on the maximum number of open files a user may keep open. The user running Alfresco had just 1024 of them, too few, it seems, for its normal operations. You can check the number of open files allowed per user with the command

cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max

Increasing this value is simple: first, edit the file /etc/sysctl.conf adding a row such as

fs.file-max = 4096

Then, run 

sysctl -p

to make the changes in the file available. Then, finally, you will need to restart your Alfresco installation.


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