How to set ulimits in Solaris 10

openldapsolarisulimit

I normally use pam_limits.so and /etc/security/limits.conf to set ulimits on file size, CPU time, etc. for the regular users logging in to my server running Ubuntu. What is the best way of doing something similar with Solaris 10?

I think it is done using /etc/system, but I have no idea what to add to the file or indeed if it is the correct file. I'm particularly interested in setting up ulimit -f without going down the .profile route.

Best Answer

On Solaris you can set this parameter to be a hard or soft limit system-wide OR you can do the same for a specific application so that it has the correct number of open file descriptors in its run-time space.

To make it a system-wide change, edit /etc/system with following entries

# Hard limit on file descriptors for single process
set rlim_fd_max = 4096

# Soft limit on the file descriptors for a single process
set rlim_fd_cur = 1024

NOTE: without setting rlim_fd_max as shown above, the default value for file descriptors or nofiles is half of the rlim_fd_cur value. So, it's best to set them both.

If you are using a Solaris project for an application space like Oracle Database, you can set the max file descriptors in the project by:

projadd -U oracle -K “process.max-file-descriptor=(priv,4096,deny)” user.oracle

Additionally, you can set it using ulimit directly in an application's owner's shell startup file. For example, it is possible to establish max file descriptors by setting ulimit in the .profile of the web server's owner to ulimit -s 32768 and calling that from the startup/shutdown script.

As you can see there are lots of options and ways of doing this.

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