How to increase global max opened files limit on OSX 13.5 Ventura

Question

I already had configured max opened files limit and it worked fine until I updated to Ventura 13.5. The limit is reset to default value now.

I tried to follow answer from this question: How to increase global maxfiles ulimit on OSX 13.1 Ventura

It worked until I enabled System Integrity Protection back via csrutil enable. When I enabled it back, the limit was reset to default value again. And I can't just disable System Integrity Protection because of company policy.

Is there a fix or a workaround for this? Or is it just a bug and we have to wait for next version or rollback to previous?

Answer 1

Apple has acknowledged that this is a bug and provided a workaround on their Developer forum article "No Longer Able to Increase Maxfile Limits MacOS Recent Versions"

For me, the following command worked:

sudo launchctl limit maxfiles 128000 524288

After that, I set ulimit like where softlimit is equal to hardlimit of maxfiles.

ulimit -n 524288 10485760

To persist the above change follow the GitHub Gist post "How to Change Open Files Limit on OS X and macOS"

Answer 2

I have the same problem. Here is what I did.

Context:

• launchctl limit maxfiles --> maxfiles 256 unlimited

256 is by far not enough for my application

Actions:

• more /Library/LaunchDaemons/limit.maxfiles.plist

to examine the /Library/LaunchDaemons/limit.maxfiles.plist file, there the limits were 20000 20000

• reboot with +R (recovery mode)
• launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/limit.maxfiles.plist

to modify permanently the 2 limits

• reboot normally

At that point, my problem was solved. But

• I did not re-enable crsutil (I'll try when I'll have made up for the time lost on this Apple bug, but as I am the sole user of this machine and that type of modification can only be done in recovery mode, I feel quite safe to stay this way...)
• there is a curious discrepancy:

ulimit -> unlimited

ulimit -Sn 20000

ulimit -Hn 20000

I hope this can help.

Answer 3

I brought this to the Apple forum and the answer I received there helped me to add a fix. Since I knew what process was opening the high volume of files I went with the wrapper approach and added the following bash file:

#!/bin/bash

ulimit -n 2000000
exec <process that is opening a large number of files>

Running this bash file instead of the process directly allowed me to run a Vite server which opens a large number of files despite not being able to change the global maxfile limits on my Mac on the newest OS.