I've been trying to figure this out for quite some time and I don't seem to be able to find any information on this issue.
diving into the issue:
I am running an application on Ubuntu 14.04 using Monit V5.6 The deployment of the application and Monit is done by using Chef scripts with AWS Opsworks which works excellent.
The problem is that once done, Monit starts the application using the following syntax:
start program = "/bin/sh -c 'ulimit -n 150000; <some more commands here which are not intersting>'" as uid <user> and gid <user_group>
This indeed starts the application using the correct user but the problem is that max open files for the process is showing 4096 instead of the number set in limits.conf
Just to be clear, I have set the following in /etc/security/limits.conf
root hard nofile 150000
root soft nofile 150000
* hard nofile 150000
* soft nofile 150000
Further more, if I stop the application then do a service monit restart and then start the application, the max open files values is received correctly and I am seeing 150000. If I then redeploy the application without rebooting the instance then this happens again and I have to manually restart monit again.
Also if I run the application using the following syntax in order to mimic Monit:
sudo -H -u <user> /bin/sh -c 'ulimit -n 150000; <more commands here>'
Then everything is working and the process is receiving the correct value of max open files. I try to script this manual service monit restart with stopping and starting the application via Chef scripts then this also fails and I receive 4096 as the max open files value thus my only option is to manually do this each time I deploy which is not very convenient.
Any help on this or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
P.S. I also reviewed the following articles:
https://serverfault.com/questions/797650/centos-monit-ulimit-not-working https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/monit-general/2010-04/msg00018.html
but as manually restarting Monit causes this to work then I am looking for a solution without changing init scripts.
