Docs: nofile or nproc?

[joaociocca (João Ciocca)]

On this thread

After adding "elasticsearch - nofile 65536" still not enough threads are allocated

Hi everyone, I am getting an error "max number of threads [1024] for user [elasticsearch] is too low, increase to at least [2048]" I opened this manual and tried the following: After trying: "sudo su ulimit -n 65536 su elasticsearch " I get an error: "This account is currently not available." After trying to add "elasticsearch - nofile 65536" to /etc/security/limits.conf the problem doesnt move. After trying to add "[Service] LimitMEMLOCK=infinity" to "/etc/systemd/system/elastic…

@jasontedor pointed that the user wants "nproc" instead of "nofile", but the documentation says "nofile", here Configuring system settings | Elasticsearch Guide [master] | Elastic

[jasontedor]

Hi! In the thread that you reference, the reporter is having trouble with the number of threads that the elasticsearch user can create:

@tomer

I am getting an error "max number of threads [1024] for user [elasticsearch] is too low, increase to at least [2048]"

This message is arising from the maximum number of threads bootstrap check. For Elasticsearch not running under systemd as a service, this limit is controlled by the nproc limit. This is why I refer the user to nproc there.

However, the page that you refer to regarding nofile is referring to a different issue. Namely the fact that the elasticsearch user also needs the ability to have a lot of file descriptors open. This is covered in the file descriptor bootstrap check. For Elasticsearch not running under systemd as a service, this limit is controlled by the nofile limit.

In short: the issue the user is running into is different than the situation covered by the docs that you link to.

I hope that helps!

[joaociocca (João Ciocca)]

It's been a while that I sent you that message, but if I remember correctly I landed on that docs page because of an error I was having - and changing nofile wasn't helping. But when I followed your advice on that thread, instead of the docs, it worked!