elasticsearch. tutorials

How to raise the nofiles limit on *NIX

ElasticSearch needs to keep lots of files open simultaneously and you will need to raise the maximum number of open files a user can have.

In this tutorial, we will assume that you are running ElasticSearch as the user elasticsearch.

To raise the limit add to /etc/security/limits.conf the lines:

    elasticsearch soft nofile 32000
    elasticsearch hard nofile 32000

Now you can check if these limits have been applied running:

    sudo -u elasticsearch -s "ulimit -Sn"

If you are logged in as elasticsearch you have to log out and log in again to see the new limits.

If you still see the previous limit, run:

    egrep -r pam_limits /etc/pam.d/

and check that all pam_limits.so are not commented out.

You can check the limit that elasticsearch really has adding the flag es.max-open-files=true, for example:

    $ bin/elasticsearch -f -Des.max-open-files=true
    [2011-04-05 04:12:02,687][INFO ][bootstrap                ]
    max_open_files [32000]

If sudo -u elasticsearch -s "ulimit -Sn" shows 32000 but you still have a low limit when you run ElasticSearch, you're probably running it through another program that doesn't support PAM: a frequent offender is supervisord.

The only solution I know to this problem is to raise the nofile limit for the user running supervisord, but this will obviously raise the limit for all the processes running under supervisord, not an ideal situation.

Consider using the ElasticSearch service wrapper instead.