Linux: Increasing the number of open file descriptors

To check and modify system limits.

[The current limit shown is 8192]
% cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max
8192

[To increase this to 65535 (as root)]
# echo "65535" > /proc/sys/fs/file-max

If you want this new value to survive across reboots you can at it to /etc/sysctl.conf

# Maximum number of open files permited
fs.file-max = 65535

Note: that this isn’t proc.sys.fs.file-max as one might expect. To list the available parameters that can be modified using sysctl do

% sysctl -a

To load new values from the sysctl.conf file.

% sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf

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