filemax & filenr

file: /proc/sys/fs/filemax & filenr
variable: fs.filemax & filenr
Official reference

The value in file-max denotes the maximum number of file- handles that the Linux kernel will allocate. When you get lots of error messages about running out of file handles, you might want to increase this limit.

Historically,the kernel was able to allocate file handles dynamically, but not to free them again. The three values in file-nr denote the number of allocated file handles, the number of allocated but unused file handles, and the maximum number of file handles. Linux 2.6 always reports 0 as the number of free file handles – this is not an error, it just means that the number of allocated file handles exactly matches the number of used file handles.

Attempts to allocate more file descriptors than file-max are reported with printk, look for “VFS: file-max limit reached".

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