How to set ulimits in Solaris 10

Solution 1:

On Solaris you can set this parameter to be a hard or soft limit system-wide OR you can do the same for a specific application so that it has the correct number of open file descriptors in its run-time space.

To make it a system-wide change, edit /etc/system with following entries

# Hard limit on file descriptors for single process
set rlim_fd_max = 4096

# Soft limit on the file descriptors for a single process
set rlim_fd_cur = 1024

NOTE: without setting rlim_fd_max as shown above, the default value for file descriptors or nofiles is half of the rlim_fd_cur value. So, it's best to set them both.

If you are using a Solaris project for an application space like Oracle Database, you can set the max file descriptors in the project by:

projadd -U oracle -K “process.max-file-descriptor=(priv,4096,deny)” user.oracle

Additionally, you can set it using ulimit directly in an application's owner's shell startup file. For example, it is possible to establish max file descriptors by setting ulimit in the .profile of the web server's owner to ulimit -s 32768 and calling that from the startup/shutdown script.

As you can see there are lots of options and ways of doing this.

Solution 2:

It's also worth mentioning plimit. This can view or set limits on already running processes.

# plimit 7028
7028:   /usr/lib/gconfd-2 18
   resource              current         maximum
  time(seconds)         unlimited       unlimited
  file(blocks)          unlimited       unlimited
  data(kbytes)          unlimited       unlimited
  stack(kbytes)         10240           unlimited
  coredump(blocks)      unlimited       unlimited
  nofiles(descriptors)  512             65536
  vmemory(kbytes)       unlimited       unlimited

Solution 3:

it is possible to establish max file descriptors by setting ulimit in the .profile of the web server's owner to ulimit -s 32768

ulimit -n 32768 - is correct