Re: Increasing Max Connections Mac OS 10.3

Joe Lester <joe_lester(at)sweetwater(dot)com> writes:
> [ lots of ]
> 2004-02-10 08:46:01 LOG: out of file descriptors: Too many open files;
> release and retry

Sounds like you need to reduce max_files_per_process. Also look at
increasing the kernel's limit on number of open files (I remember seeing
it in sysctl's output yesterday, but I forget what it's called).

> Even though I'm getting these messages in my log, all the queries I
> send to the server seem to be working.

The Postgres server itself will generally survive this condition
(because it usually has other open files it can close). However,
everything else on the system is likely to start falling over :-(.
You don't want to run with the kernel file table completely full.

I'd suggest setting max_files_per_process to something like 50 to 100,
and making sure that the kernel's limit is max_files_per_process *
max_connections plus plenty of slop for the rest of the system.

regards, tom lane