From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Joe Damato <ice799@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: running out of file descriptors
Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:18:53 -0800
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To: Bryan Christ <bryan.christ@gmail.com>
Cc: linux-c-programming@vger.kernel.org

On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 9:48 PM, Bryan Christ <bryan.christ@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am writing a multi-threaded application which services hundreds of
> remote connections for data transfer.  Several instances of this
> program are run simultaneously.  The problem is that whenever the
> total number of active user connections (cumulative total of all open
> sockets tallied from all process instances) reaches about 700 the
> system appears to run out of file descriptors.  I have tried raising
> the open files limit via "ulimit -n" and by using the setrlimit()
> facility.  Neither of these seem to help.  I am currently having to
> limit the number of processes running on the system to 2 instances
> allowing no more than 256 connections each.

Have you tried editing /etc/security/limits.conf  (or equivalent file
on your system) to increase the max number of open files?

perhaps something like:
*              -       nofile         524288

is what you want?

joe