just got back from the second day of a bigger recording situation: 13 tracks for drums, 4 for bass up to now. We recorded some songs and suddenly got stuck with the error “too many open files”, and Ardour wasn’t even able to save the session.
I had 1024 audio and peak files in the session’s folder. I then had to clear unused sources to be able to keep recording. Now I’ve searched the internet and found something about a file limit in /etc/security/limits.conf.
It seems like real time processes were restricted to 1024 open files at the default setting.
Will the line
USER hard nofiles unlimited
fix my problem?
robsch pointed me at my typo: It’s “nofile” andn ot “nofiles”.
peder is right that unlimited does not work, but “USER - nofile 100000” (yes, one-hundred thousand) works!
Is there a place where we could make this known to the Ardour using public?
peder: Yes, it seems like a lot, but if you have 5 songs with 17 tracks, you only need about 10 takes per song to get 1000 files. And then I always record some takes just for sound check and phasing corrections, so it all sums up pretty quickly.
And we will add rythm and solo guitars, a trumpet and vocals, so let’s say another 10 tracks.
seablade: It would be great if you could look it up.
I will test the limits.conf line.
EDIT: I just tested “USER hard nofiles unlimited” and “USER hard nofiles 10000” but the problem remains the same… “too many open files” when I get over 1024 files.
First, I’m a bit impressed you managed to have 1024 open files with only 17 tracks. That’s like 60 files per track
Second, adding that line and logging out/in should fix it, though I’m not sure if the keyword ‘unlimited’ is allowed. If it doesn’t work you can just replace it with 10000 or something.
Hmm no this is not a realtime specific setting. We ran into this some time ago on Mac and had to programmatically remove the limit to number of open files in Ardour, but I don’t remember the solution on Linux, it may be your above line may be correct but I would have to look it up.
