File Descriptor Issues

Under heavy load condition, Web Server may run out of file descriptors. In such cases you will get an error like the following:

[18/Dec/2005:20:01:03] failure ( 3014): HTTP3069: 
Error accepting connection (PR_PROC_DESC_TABLE_FULL_ERROR: file descriptor table full)

Increase the file descriptor limit either per process or per system and restart the system.

Linux limits the number of file descriptors that any one process may open; the default limits are 1024 per process. These limits can prevent optimum performance of Web Server. The open file limit is one of the limits that can be tuned with the ulimit command. The command ulimit -aS displays the current limit, and ulimit -aH displays the hard limit (above which the limit cannot be increased without tuning kernel parameters). For setting the limit to hard limit, execute the following command:

ulimit -n unlimited