Too many open files - how to find the culprit

You can use lsof to understand who's opening so many files. Usually it's a (web)server that opens so many files, but lsof will surely help you identify the cause.

Once you understand who's the bad guy you can

• kill the process/stop the program
• raise the ulimit

If output from lsof is quite huge try redirecting it to a file and then open the file

Example (you might have to Ctrl+C the first command)

lsof > ~/Desktop/lsof.log
cat ~/Desktop/lsof.log | awk '{ print $2 " " $1; }' | sort -rn | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20
vim ~/Desktop/lsof.log

In case anyone else needs it...

ulimit -a

Will display all current limits. Specifically ulimit -n 70000 will set the file descriptor limit.

Also...

cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max

Will display/set the kernel limit if edited.

sudo echo 200000 > /proc/sys/fs/file-max

A much more detailed explanation can be found at...

How do I increase the open files limit for a non-root user?