OK, here is the picture, seems that this affects all systems based on Ubuntu, was found in Fedora, too and probably is an inheritance from old Debian times.
Apparently a lot of inexplicable crashes with various applications are due to a security limitation in the number of files that can be opened. The default value is 1024, which might make sense on old systems with little resources, but when using a modern computer and e.g. databases, this limit can lead to crashes of various applications. We in the Amarok team had this bug reported quite often and found the solution: One needs to add these lines to /etc/security/limits.conf: * soft nofile 16384 // or whatever number seems appropriate * hard nofile 16384 // ditto For "database hungry" apps this can well be much higher, but 1024 by default is simply not appropriate anymore in 2009... For reference, see this report on KDE's bugzilla: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211026 Jonathan and Sebastien, I subscribed you since I don't know who is responsible for that part of the system. This affects all applications that need to be able to open more than 1024 files, like database using apps (e.g. Amarok, Strigi, MySQL, etc.) ** Bug watch added: KDE Bug Tracking System #211026 http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211026 -- CRON stacks processes and system eventually becomes unresponsive due to too many open files https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/417025 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
