topic Too many open files on forwarders in Getting Data In

Too many open files on forwarders

oreoshake — Thu, 06 May 2010 01:32:21 GMT

I'm starting to get a lot of these errors on my forwarders. Any suggestions? Pushing /etc/security/limits.conf doesn't sound ideal.

I'm running heavy forwarders as root.

Re: Too many open files on forwarders

jrodman — Thu, 06 May 2010 04:31:10 GMT

You probably should work with support and/or investigate which files are open by looking in proc, or using lsof. We might be a bit too aggressive in how many files we open in the new tailing code, but that's just a wild guess.

Re: Too many open files on forwarders

netwrkr — Wed, 19 May 2010 22:23:49 GMT

limits.conf shouldn't come into play unless you explicity have 'nofile' defined.

This is actually a pretty typical issue on the systems I've seen, and quite easily fixed.

'ulimit'

I typically double the number of open files to start.

Using a RHEL/Fedora/Cent OS vi /etc/profile

20,000 number of open files ulimit -n 20000

I then 'source' /etc/profile so my current shell will apply that new value

'source /etc/profile'

Verify 'ulimit -n'

Then restart splunk.

Verify splunk applied the new settings by viewing splunk/var/log/splunkd.log

Looking for this line "INFO ulimit - Limit: open files: 20000 files"