Too Many open files, Why my logs are showing Too many open file and server behaving weirdly.

Recently during work i started facing weird problem, server became slow , connection to other server were intermittent. lot of different kinds of logs which made me scratched my head. During log analysis i found one error message was interesting for me.

“Too Many Open file” , What too many open file ? , in my application i was not creating or accessing any file. then why weblogic complaining about too many open file ?

After Quick Google Search, i realized in linux , Socket connections are treated as files . so any socket connection created by any linux process will be consider one open file. OK As my weblogic java process create lot of socket connection ,it met the maximum limit of open files which a process can open.

How to check and verify that, How to find out max open file limit. Again lot of researched helped me to get answer of all these question.

How to find max open file limit

Linux has default limit of resource usages by a process , so process does not eat-up all resources of system and destabilized the system. These limit can be obtained using ulimit command.

So on linux terminal , if we type ulimit -a , it will provide all resource constraint. for example on my mac when i run this command i get below output.