When installing the latest Oracle Service Bus (11gR1PS3) onto my Ubuntu 10.04 system, the Eclipse IDE was complaining about there being too many open files. The Oracle Service Bus and the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (aka OEPE) do make use of ALOT of files. By default, Ubuntu will restrict each user to 1024 open files. A much more realistic number for OSB development is 4096.

Changing the file limit in Ubuntu is fairly simple (if arcane). You will need to modify two different files and then restart your server. First, you need to modify the limits.conf file as the root user. Open a terminal window and enter the following command:

sudo gedit /etc/security/limits.conf

Add the following 2 lines to the file. The asterisk simply means that the rule will apply to all users.

* soft nofile 4096
* hard nofile 4096

Save your changes and close gedit.

The second file to change is the common-session file. Use the following command:

sudo gedit /etc/pam.d/common-session

Add the following line:

session required pam_limits.so

Save the file and exit gedit. Restart your machine. You shouldn't have any more problems with too many open files anymore.