I'm struggling to work out how to set the open file limit on rsyslog on Ubuntu 14.04. It uses Upstart, which ignores limits.conf, but I'd expect to be able to put
limit nofile 16384 16384
in /etc/init/rsyslog.conf as suggested by this rsyslog email list post. But having done that and run restart rsyslog, when I check /proc/$RYSLOGPID/limits I can see that the "Max open files" is still 1024 soft, 4096 hard.
My first guess was that the problem is related to the fact that the Upstart script uses script tags rather than a simple exec to launch rsyslog, which does some kind of fancy forking stuff. However, I tried putting a ulimit -n in the script section, but to no avail, and I also tried getting rid of the script stuff (which exists purely to make sure that the stuff from /etc/default/rsyslog is in the environment -- this file was empty apart from setting RSYSLOGD_OPTIONS to an empty string, so it was a no-op), also to no avail.
Does anyone have any ideas?
Full upstart script follows:
# rsyslog - system logging daemon
#
# rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded replacement for the traditional
# syslog daemon, logging messages from applications
description "system logging daemon"
start on filesystem
stop on runlevel [06]
expect fork
respawn
limit nofile 16384 16384
pre-start script
/lib/init/apparmor-profile-load usr.sbin.rsyslogd
end script
script
. /etc/default/rsyslog
exec rsyslogd $RSYSLOGD_OPTIONS
end script
