Difference between A class and N class esp file descritors

[Phil Marshalsea]

Hi all,

I am running an application that makes heavy use of threads and socket connections and am hitting limits on the A class machine im using. The A class has 4gb of memory but the application falls over when i reach 6666 file descriptors (maxfiles nfiles all higher than this). The problem is the N class machine worked fine with the application even though it has less memory (well 3gb). My question is is there a difference between the two machines in there capacity to deal with file descriptors in socket connections.

TIA

Phil

[Stefan Farrelly]

Even though maxfiles and maxfiles_lim (file descriptors) may be set both really high there is still a soft limit (kernel=hard limit) for shells. You can see it udner posix shell by doing;
ulimit -a

And you can see the nofiles limit (descriptors). We just had a similar problem here which was solved by invoking from the shell ulimit -n before starting our applications and this fixed our problem. By default the soft limit from ulimit is much much lower than the hard limit.

[Phil Marshalsea]

I checked the ulimits and they look ok . Ive just completed testing on the N class and that handles the 15000 file descriptors without a problem. I am presuming (hoping) there is some limit within the A class architecture for the number of file descriptors one can use as the N class as i said performs fine .. Ill try HP h/ware support as well..

Thanks

Phil