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I am trying to set the max open files on CentOS 7 for elasticsearch. I've read over and over again how to set this but it doesn't seem to be working. As I understand it:

  • limits.conf is irrelevant because elasticsearch user is set to /sbin/nologin and we're starting the daemon with system
  • I need to set LimitNOFILE=65535 in the systemd unit file.

So, I went ahead and did that, here's my unit file, it's provided by the elasticsearch puppet module:

[Unit] Description=Starts and stops a single elasticsearch instance on this system Documentation=http://www.elasticsearch.org [Service] Type=forking EnvironmentFile=/etc/sysconfig/elasticsearch-graylog2 User=elasticsearch Group=elasticsearch PIDFile=/var/run/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-graylog2.pid ExecStart=/usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch -d -p /var/run/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-graylog2.pid -Des.default.path.home=${ES_HOME} -Des.default.path.logs=${LOG_DIR} -Des.default.path.data=${DATA_DIR} -Des.default.path.work=${WORK_DIR} -Des.default.path.conf=${CONF_DIR} # See MAX_OPEN_FILES in sysconfig LimitNOFILE=65535 # See MAX_LOCKED_MEMORY in sysconfig, use "infinity" when MAX_LOCKED_MEMORY=unlimited and using bootstrap.mlockall: true # Shutdown delay in seconds, before process is tried to be killed with KILL (if configured) TimeoutStopSec=20 [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target

Note how limitNOFILE is set here. I have also set MAX_OPEN_FILES in my EnvironmentFile:

CONF_DIR=/etc/elasticsearch/graylog2 CONF_FILE=/etc/elasticsearch/graylog2/elasticsearch.yml ES_GROUP=elasticsearch ES_HOME=/usr/share/elasticsearch ES_USER=elasticsearch LOG_DIR=/var/log/elasticsearch/graylog2 MAX_OPEN_FILES=65535

However, elasticsearch still reports that the max open files are 4096, both from within the app itself, and from with /proc/<pid>/limits

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong here? I even tried setting this from within limits.conf but as I expected, no luck.

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  • This smells like the work SELinux to me... Commented Jan 5, 2016 at 18:07
  • SELinux is disabled, first thing I checked. sestatus SELinux status: disabled Commented Jan 5, 2016 at 18:14
  • I have exact the same configs as you and it works fine on mine.. Sorry I can't be much help Commented Jan 5, 2016 at 18:18

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I did this:

/etc/security/limits.d/elasticuser # Default limit for number of open files for elastic user elastic hard nofile 65536

And included this in systemd like you did

LimitNOFILE=65536

seems to work fine

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-1

User cannot be set to /sbin/nologin, this is the path to its shell. So you need to tune your limits.conf

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  • That's what I meant, the elasticsearch user has shell /sbin/nologin Commented Jan 5, 2016 at 18:14
  • Type of shell doesn't matter. Anyway you can try the following 1. Find out under which user elasticsearch is running. 2. In user's .bash_profile add 'ulimit -n unlimited' 3. If it works reduce 'unlimited' to reasonable value. Commented Jan 5, 2016 at 18:21
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    That didn't help, as I expected, because .bash_profile is only executed by a login shell Commented Jan 5, 2016 at 18:31
  • try to add in .bashrc as well Commented Jan 5, 2016 at 18:33

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