Increase the number of available sockets on Linux

The Spotfire Server will open many connections, and each will require a file descriptor. For performance and security reasons Linux has a cap on how many connections that can be opened by a process per default. This limit might need to be increased.

To change this limit, edit the /etc/security/limits.conf file as root and make the following changes or add the following lines, respectively:

spotuser soft nofile 8192
spotuser hard nofile 65000

Where spotuser is the account that is running the Spotfire Server.

In this example, 8192 files (which includes sockets) can be opened. The setting should be high enough for the system, but not too high. To test the limit without editing the file one can run, for example
ulimit -n 32000

With a value up to to the hard limit to see what the suitable limit is.

The hard limit might be increased if needed but not to more than is given by /proc/sys/fs/file-max.