How to change default ulimit values in Mac OS X 10.6?

Question

Mac OS X limits number of processes to 266 and open files to 256. Sometimes this is problem; 256 open files and 266 processes aren't that much.

How it's possible to change default ulimit values in Mac OS X 10.6.7?

(Hopefully there's no difference between 10.6.7 and other Snow Leopard releases.)

Related question in serverfault. Unfortunately, answer is for Mac OS X 10.5, and it's not working in 10.6.

score 52 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 05 '11 at 14:58

launchctl has control over that now.

You can do a

launchctl limit maxfiles 2048 2048

to set the soft and hard limits for maximum files open. For more information see the 'limit' section of:

score 9 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:33

9

There's an answer on StackOverflow for this one. Apparently ulimit does it now.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:33

Community

answered Apr 05 '11 at 23:47

atl

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 01 '20 at 20:29

4

As @snowe2010 said in a comment, the correct command for Sierra+ would be:

launchctl limit maxfiles 2048 unlimited

answered Oct 01 '20 at 20:29

hernvnc

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered May 21 '15 at 17:14

1

FYI.

.bash_profile update didn't help me for OS v10.10.3, but reinstallation NodeJS from 0.10.35 to 0.12.3 helped me, and error disappear.

answered May 21 '15 at 17:14

Andrii Lundiak

4 Answers4