Increasing the Maximum Number of File Descriptors

Owned by Kevin Wu
Jun 15, 2023
1 min read

You may need to increase the maximum number of file descriptors on a system with large configurations. The procedure below describes how to increase the limit on a Linux system.

  1. Check the current limit:

    $ cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max



  2. Change the limit:

    $ sysctl -w fs.file-max=<new limit>



  3. The limit will be reset to the previous value if the host is rebooted. Add or update the following line in the file /etc/sysctl.conf to make the change permanent:

    fs.file-max=<new limit>