Don't change max values unless it's really needed. Not every production machine ...

AlTobey · on June 24, 2014

Increasing the max setting does not consume additional resources. It merely makes it possible for applications to get the resources they ask for.

For example, just this morning Chromium started failing because I hand't disabled limits on one of my machines. I pulled down my standard settings, applied them, then the problem went away. It wont' be coming back either.

adobriyan · on June 25, 2014

> Increasing the max setting does not consume additional resources. It merely makes it possible for applications to get the resources they ask for.

From unswappable kernel memory, yeah.

> kernel.pid_max = 999999

> * - nproc unlimited

1.000.000 pids is 1 mil task_struct's.

On my quite stripped out kernel 14 task_struct's fit into order 3 slab -- 14 objects per 32KB or kernel memory.

1000000 / 14 * 32 * 1024 = 2.18 GB of kernel memory

and that's not even counting other kernel structures!