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Dmitriy Kolomiits

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Kolomiits / post-mortem.md
Created October 19, 2022 12:02 — forked from joewiz/post-mortem.md
Recovery from nginx "Too many open files" error on Amazon AWS Linux

On Tue Oct 27, 2015, history.state.gov began buckling under load, intermittently issuing 500 errors. Nginx's error log was sprinkled with the following errors:

2015/10/27 21:48:36 [crit] 2475#0: accept4() failed (24: Too many open files)

2015/10/27 21:48:36 [alert] 2475#0: *7163915 socket() failed (24: Too many open files) while connecting to upstream...

An article at http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-nginx-too-many-open-files/ provided directions that mostly worked. Below are the steps we followed. The steps that diverged from the article's directions are marked with an *.

  1. * Instead of using su to run ulimit on the nginx account, use ps aux | grep nginx to locate nginx's process IDs. Then query each process's file handle limits using cat /proc/pid/limits (where pid is the process id retrieved from ps). (Note: sudo may be necessary on your system for the cat command here, depending on your system.)
  2. Added fs.file-max = 70000 to /etc/sysctl.conf