kern.maxfiles questions

[paul beard]

I'm still having some issues with file descriptors being used up. 
Symptomatically, my http listener will become sluggish and some cgi 
processes I use will time out. The logs have a raft of these messages:

Dec 27 22:46:13 red /kernel: kern.maxfiles limit exceeded by uid 80, 
please see tuning(7).
Dec 27 22:47:12 red /kernel: kern.maxfiles limit exceeded by uid 1004, 
please see tuning(7).

I can't even query sysctl, but after stopping httpd and postfix (the 
processes being run by those UIDs) I can finally get this information.

[/usr/home/paul]:: sysctl kern.openfiles kern.maxfiles
kern.openfiles: 257
kern.maxfiles: 4040

and on further examination I am finding some swap shortages (this 
machine has 512 Mb of real memory but only the same amount of swap).

what tunables can be twiddled, assuming swap doesn't solve this?

FreeBSD red.paulbeard.org 4.9-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE #3: Sun Dec 
21 14:01:26 PST 2003     
root at red.paulbeard.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/RED  i386

--
Paul Beard
<www.paulbeard.org/>
paulbeard [at] mac.com