file: table is full

[Roy Smith]

I have a 8 meg 3/180 server on which some fairly large jobs are run by a
daemon triggered by some incomming mail.  On fairly frequent occasions, I
get mail bounced to me with "unknown mailer error -1" and lots of lines in
/usr/adm/messages saying "file: table is full".

My kernel was configured with MAXUSERS=4 until a couple of days ago.  I
tried bumping it up to 8 but that doesn't seem to have helped.  I'm
booting one with MAXUSERS=12 right now, but I'm not sure that just putting
bigger numbers there is what I should be doing.  Is there anything more
specific I can do to prevent the "file: table is full" messages?  I assume
that means that I have more files open system-wide than there are slots in
some file descriptor table for.

Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
roy at alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy
"Arcane?  Did you say arcane?  It wouldn't be Unix if it wasn't arcane!"