general: warning: max open files (3636) is smaller than max sockets (4096)

[David Kelly]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 12:31:43PM -0600, Squirrel wrote:
> This happend since I've upgraded bind 9.21 to 9.6.0.  I've increased
> the max open files to 4096:
> 
>    sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=4096
> 
> which shows it resized from 4040->4096
> 
> But I guess it's different for bind?  I've googled and found several
> references to this warning message, but everyone states it's not a
> problem and shouldn't be concerned.  Some real advice would be
> appreciated.

Depends a lot as to how busy your name server is, I guess.

Mine is a lightly loaded in internal office use. When my PII 450 MHz
192MB machine issued similar complaint on upgrade of bind I was tricked
into rebooting a machine with over 800 days uptime only to get the exact
same message again.

So I limited the number of sockets named would ask for using this in
/etc/rc.conf:

named_flags="-4 -S 1024"

-- 
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly at HiWAAY.net
========================================================================
Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.