How to increase global maxfiles ulimit on OSX 13.1 Ventura

Question

This is an old problem, but again, none of the old solutions work anymore.

Default ulimit is far too low and I need to increase it to basically unlimited (like let's say a million).

And I need to increase it globally. Not just in the shell, so .zshrc-based solutions won't work; notably they won't apply to docker.

Increasing it in launchctl doesn't seem to persist it (and does it even do anything?)

(and yes, I now there's a lot of existing answers to this - but they only work on older OSX; I don't know if there's any "close as no longer working" function)

Answer 1

Increasing it in launchctl doesn't seem to persist it (and does it even do anything?)

If you need the ulimit modification to a specific launch daemon/agent, then you could try adding this to your .plist file (which works for me on Ventura)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>

...

  <key>HardResourceLimits</key>
  <dict>
    <key>NumberOfFiles</key>
    <integer>64000</integer>
  </dict>
  <key>SoftResourceLimits</key>
  <dict>
    <key>NumberOfFiles</key>
    <integer>64000</integer>
  </dict>

...

</dict>
</plist>

Answer 2

Here are working steps. It requires 4 restarts. Old methods do not work:

• boot into recovery mode - shut down the computer, press power button and keep holding it until Options appear, select Options, Continue
• open Terminal from menu and run: csrutil clear
• restart and return to the recovery mode like before
• open Terminal from menu and run: csrutil disable
• restart again (nto normal mode
• create /Library/LaunchDaemons/limit.maxfiles.plist, following insturctions from this post (contents also copied below)
• restart again, you finally have correct maxfiles limit globally

Here's what should be in limit.maxfiles.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" 
 "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0"> 
 <dict>
 <key>Label</key>
 <string>limit.maxfiles</string>
 <key>ProgramArguments</key>
 <array>
 <string>launchctl</string>
 <string>limit</string>
 <string>maxfiles</string>
 <string>64000</string>
 <string>524288</string>
 </array>
 <key>RunAtLoad</key>
 <true/>
 <key>ServiceIPC</key>
 <false/>
 </dict>
</plist>