If you had few thousands Virtualhosts each few log files etc. - apache won't start if the amount of file handlers exceed around 32k. We are not hitting the system limits. # limits -U apache Resource limits for class default: cputime infinity secs filesize infinity kB datasize infinity kB stacksize infinity kB coredumpsize infinity kB memoryuse infinity kB memorylocked infinity kB maxprocesses infinity openfiles infinity sbsize infinity bytes vmemoryuse infinity kB # # limit cputime unlimited filesize unlimited datasize 33554432 kbytes stacksize 524288 kbytes coredumpsize unlimited memoryuse unlimited vmemoryuse unlimited descriptors 131072 memorylocked unlimited maxproc 65536 sbsize unlimited
truss of startup failure?
> truss of startup failure? What do you mean exactly?
You'll need to provide some kind of trace to show your OS is not simply returning an error after 32k file descriptors are used. Some type of truss/strace/ should be able to show the failing call (you might also have an error in your terminal or base configs error log)