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I have an application which keeps giving me the following error.

tail: inotify cannot be used, reverting to polling: Too many open files

I have already followed all the advice I've been able to find on web searches, and have changed the number of open file descriptors in all ways I know how. I've also rebooted the server. What might still be blocking my process from opening more files?

Some useful data:

# lsof | wc -l
8347
$ lsof -u <username> | wc -l
7533
$ cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max
98349
$ cat /etc/security/limits.conf
...
<username>       soft    nofile      32768
<username>       hard    nofile      65536
...
$ ulimit -Hn
65536
$ ulimit -Sn
32768
sffc
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1 Answers1

2

Open your terminal and type as

sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches

to check current limit. If you want to modify it then type in terminal as root 

vim /etc/sysctl.conf

Then at the end add this following line

fs.inotify.max_user_watches = XXXXXX

In the XXXXXX place your desired value.

let me know if you are still facing any issues.

Raja G
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    Thank you for the direction. It looks like "sysctl" was the last place I needed to go to increase the allowance for file descriptors (particularly the inotify ones). I did however need to increase one more setting in order to solve my issue, `fs.inotify.max_user_instances`, which I set to 512. – sffc Jul 09 '14 at 07:55
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    An addendum for other people with this issue: you need to run `sudo sysctl -p` in order to refresh the settings according to */etc/sysctl.conf*, and the two settings to add/change in that file are `max_user_watches` and `max_user_instances`, both under `fs.inotify`. – sffc Jul 09 '14 at 08:55