[Gllug] [CHINWAG] /proc

John Hearns john.hearns at cern.ch
Thu May 23 12:56:53 UTC 2002


On Thu, 2002-05-23 at 13:40, John Hearns wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-05-23 at 12:26, Colin Murphy wrote:
>
> 
> 
> So let's have a round table discussion on:
> 
> (a) /proc - what the heck is it?
> 
> (b) what is it used for - is it any USE for anything?
> 
> (c) are there any fun - or time wasting - things which could be
> piped to the /proc system?
> 
> 

Ah well. Looks like this discussion is dying the death.

I'll give Colin an example of (c)

Have a look in /proc/sys/fs

In there, one of the files is file-max, which is a 
limit to the total number of file descriptors a system can have open
at any one time.

Example from real life here - one hour after going live
with a new mail server, it mysteriously stopped working.
Ooops....
Logs say 'too many open files on system'

The fix is/was to increase the file-max size (dramatically!)
This is done by:

echo "123456" >/proc/sys/fs/inode-max 

and putting this command in the local startup script.

Sorry - that's not really fun, or time wasting.
Pretty vital in this case though....




(123456 is just an example)





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