Too many open files (on Mac)

[jimafisk]

@claxxmoldii reported a Mac specific error in the comments on our youtube:

watcher.go.51: Error watching 'assets/' folder for changes: too many open files

This happened when adding themify icons to the assets folder, removing themify fixes the issue.

We use fsnotify under the hood to watch the filesystem for changes. Hugo uses the same project and their users sometimes report a similar issue:

• https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/error-hugo-0-52-too-many-open-files/17653
• Latest hugo fails in watch mode on "too many open files" on OS X gohugoio/hugo#6109
• Fix regression with "too many open files" on macOS gohugoio/hugo#3582

[padraicbc]

@jimafisk is this an OS issue more than a Plenti/fsnotify bug? increasing kern.maxfiles and kern.maxfilesperproc as discussed here and in the docs should rectify the issue or am I missing something?

[jimafisk]

I think you're right @padraicbc. It seems like Hugo may have implemented a fix in their project to achieve a similar result: gohugoio/hugo@ff54b6b

I haven't been able to reproduce this issue on my Ubuntu 20.04 laptop, but @claxxmoldii reported still experiencing this problem yesterday in the comments of a Plenti video. Jon I know you mentioned trying to increase your OS soft and hard limits, were you running something similar to the following commands to do that?

sudo sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=65536
sudo sysctl -w kern.maxfilesperproc=65536
ulimit -n 65536 65536

[claxxmoldii]

hey there... the solution i tried was this...

sudo launchctl limit maxfiles 64000 524288

still throwing the error... then increased it to...

sudo launchctl limit maxfiles 1000000 1000000

still throwing an error... i'm running osx mojave...

[padraicbc]

hey there... the solution i tried was this...

sudo launchctl limit maxfiles 64000 524288

still throwing the error... then increased it to...

sudo launchctl limit maxfiles 1000000 1000000

still throwing an error... i'm running osx mojave...

Hi @claxxmoldii. You'll need to add the plist files mentioned here https://wilsonmar.github.io/maximum-limits/#sierra-and-newer-versions