The last Chrome update and one of the last Thunderbird updates caused some strange crashes of either on of them on my Ubuntu 13.10. All is fine, it runs great and all of a sudden *boom*, browser window gone, or email client gone.
Luckily .xsession-errors exists and there I could find some entries like this:
[3827:4038:0518/230904:ERROR:shared_memory_posix.cc(226)] Creating shared memory in /dev/shm/.com.google.Chrome.12UDei failed: Too many open files
Not good. But there is help. For MyEclipse I had the same issue in the past. But it didn’t seem necessary anymore since 13.10. But I also haven’t used it in a while. Anywhoo, here is what has to be done. And before I forget it, all these changes have to be done as root.
First check the setting for file-max with the following command
cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max
In my case this value seems fine, as it is well beyond the 200,000 that they recommend.
peter@majestix:~$ cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max
1627431
If that is below 200,000 you can set by adding the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf
fs.file-max=200000
The next is the ulimit setting for open files. You can check it with the following command
ulimit -n
This one was set to 1024 in my case and that can be a little bit low. At MyEclipse they recommend setting it to 65535 and that’s what I did. Just add the following lines to /etc/security/limits.conf
* hard nofile 65535
* soft nofile 65535
Afterwards restart your machine and all should be fine. If you only have to change the sysctl.conf setting then you can activate that change with the following command
service procps start