[rabbitmq-discuss] Increasing the file descriptors limit

Thu Jan 17 16:25:37 GMT 2013

On 01/17/2013 02:39 PM, Simon MacMullen wrote:
> Hi Jean Paul. On Ubuntu / Debian we now start RabbitMQ with
> start-stop-daemon, which quite explicitly does *not* start a new PAM
> session, so the second change you made did does not take effect.
>
> http://superuser.com/questions/454465/make-ulimits-work-with-start-stop-daemon
>
>
> discusses this issue (in non-RabbitMQ-specific terms).
>
> The best thing you can do is add a line to /etc/security/limits.conf for
> *root* - the RabbitMQ service will then inherit this.
>
> Cheers, Simon

Hi Simon and Tim,

Apparently I was complicating the whole issue.

There is no need to edit any files such as /etc/security/limits.conf or 
/etc/pam.d/common-session.

Only the following needs to be done:

cat > /etc/default/rabbitmq-server << "EOF"
# This file is sourced by /etc/init.d/rabbitmq-server. Its primary
# reason for existing is to allow adjustment of system limits for the
# rabbitmq-server process.
#
# Maximum number of open file handles. This will need to be increased
# to handle many simultaneous connections. Refer to the system
# documentation for ulimit (in man bash) for more information.
#
ulimit -n 102400
EOF

This file is already created by the rabbitmq-server package, except that 
the last line is commented out and has a different value.

As described well in the comment, the file will be sourced by the init 
script. Since the init script is run by a privileged user, there are no 
problems with increasing the hard limit.

Thank you both for your help, appreciate it.

Jean Paul