Apache filehandle issue expected to be mission critical for image uploading

Question

I have a fresh install of Drupal Commons (version 6.25), and I am not allowed to upload an image. See the full description of this so called image upload issue here on this site.

new Update one a sitenote...

i want to mention that i - for the purpose of some tests have put two sites onto the server

http://schulcenter.net (for sure Version Drupal-Commons 6.25) http://schulcenter.org - (probably Version Drupal-Commons 6.23)

and they run on the same database ;-)

guess that that can cause the open File handles what do you think !? Love to hear from you

well i guess that i have to switch off one site. ;-) greetings (end of update)

here the original-initial-thread starts:

I have changed some settings regarding the file handling; I set the permissions for sites/default/files, I created a temporary directory and edited the paths accordingly. All of these seem to work, and workarounds did not change the bad habit of the site: The image upload is impossible.

Can we verify the impact of a decreased amount of Apache File handlers on the possibilities and capabilities of file, and image-handles, especially of the option to upload images? Is there any impact?

dman, a very experienced web and Drupal developer, had a closer look at the site and noticed the site status under the 'Reports' tab lists many errors, including the following one:

opendir(*) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: Too many open files in /home/vhost/WWW/schulcenter.net/includes/file.inc on line 963.

It seems like it could make anything on the site break, especially things that work with files, but also anything that reads files.
I have more than 1200 repots of such message about opendir("profiles/drupal_commons/modules/acquia/acquia_search/apachesolr/drush").

I do not have installed any drush. Besides this thing, I have no clue why we get such a big amount of open file handles the server is faced with.

The dblog module monitors your website, capturing system events in a log to be reviewed by an authorized individual at a later time. The dblog log is simply a list of recorded events containing usage data, performance data, errors, warnings and operational information. It is vital to check the dblog report on a regular basis as it is often the only way to tell what is going on.

Details Type php Date Sunday, 18 March, 2012 - 21:48 User martin Location http://schulcenter.net/?q=admin/reports/dblog Referrer
Message opendir(profiles/drupal_commons/modules/acquia/acquia_search/apachesolr/drush) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: Too many open files in /home/vhost/WWW/schulcenter.net/includes/file.inc on line 963. Severity error Hostname 188.99.184.201 Operations

Answer 1

Did you find this comment on drupal.org?

The problem is a maximum open files limit per users.
We had several web servers, and several new Apache2 VirtualHost; Apache2 (www-data) reached the maximum number of open files (1024).

You can check that with ulimit -a or ulimit -n. (The default is maximum 1024 open files.)

You can modify it with ulimit -n 1500, but it will be lost after reboot.

To make the change permanent, add in /etc/security/limits.conf:

#<domain> <type> <item> <value>
#
www-data soft nofile 1600
www-data hard nofile 65535

Of course, restart your web server.

It explains how to set a per-user limit and increase the number of files that can be opened. If you don't have enough memory in the server, there may not be many options.