Number of open files scalability?

From: Andrey Borzenkov
Date: Sat Jun 20 2009 - 05:38:33 EST


Hi,

we have a customer that requires large number of open files. Basically,
it is SAP with large Oracle database with relatively large number of
concurrent connections from worker processes. Right now the amount
permanently opened files is above 128000; with current trends of DB and
load growth it could easily rocket up to and above of 1000000.

So the questions are

- is there any per-process or per-user limit for number of open files
imposed by kernel (except of course set by rlimits)?

- is there any fs/file-max limit except imposed by data type (int)?

- finally, how scalable is the implementation? Will having one million
of open files impose any noticeable slowdown? If yes, what operations
are affected? I.e. opening new files/creating new process is not that
important; but having to search 1000000 files for every operation would
be fatal.

The platform is x86_64, SLES 9 with likely update to SLES10.

Thank you!

-andrey

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