NodeJS error “EMFILE, too many open files” on Mac OS

Question

For sometime I am having the following error:

Error: EMFILE, too many open files  \'/Users/blagus/Gallery/Websites/Nicsware/Pills/resources/core/auth.node.js         


        

Answer 1

As for other questions about EMFILE error, you have to manage a queue to limit number of files opened at the same time. Increasing limit will only delay your problem.

There is some responses there : node and Error: EMFILE, too many open files

Answer 2

awongh's answer worked for me

ulimit -n 10480

But only after starting an interactive shell

sudo -i

Outside of the shell I kept getting a permission error on OSX Yosemite

Answer 3

None of the other answers worked for me. This did the trick:

launchctl limit maxfiles 16384 16384 

Also to note, this doesn't save across sessions so unless you want to run it for each bash terminal session I suggest putting the above line in your ~/.bashrc (or ~/.zshrc if you are using zsh) by doing this at the command line:

vi ~/.bashrc

Answer 4

i had this error and the ulimit and launchclt didn't work for me,

this solution from http://yabfog.com/blog/2014/10/22/yosemite-upgrade-changes-open-file-limit worked for me

echo kern.maxfiles=65536 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
echo kern.maxfilesperproc=65536 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
sudo sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=65536
sudo sysctl -w kern.maxfilesperproc=65536
ulimit -n 65536 65536

and then putting the

ulimit -n 65536 65536

into ~/.bashrc

Answer 5

Your code is opening too many files. By default, OS X has a limit of 256 simultaneously opened files. When your code requires a new module, node has to open the file to read it in. If you are already at this limit, node's require cannot continue and will throw an Error. You should audit places in your application where you are calling fs.open and ensuring that you are properly closing all of those files. You may also encounter this problem if you attempt to do too many simultaneous file system reads, since each pending read will be an open file. I have also encountered this problem while using fs.watchFile, which also requires opening a handle to the file.