I’ve been hitting a lot of “Maximum file limit exceeded” dialogs after a long day at work – at any point in time I’ve got a kajillion Chrome tabs open, five or six Rails envs running (for dev and test) + Guard/Spork actively watching tests, and Sublime with another kajillion tabs open.

Turns out that OSX limits the number of open file descriptors per process to 256. Time to bump up the limit:

First, check out your current file limit:

$ launchctl limit

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    cpu         unlimited      unlimited      
    filesize    unlimited      unlimited      
    data        unlimited      unlimited      
    stack       8388608        67104768       
    core        0              unlimited      
    rss         unlimited      unlimited      
    memlock     unlimited      unlimited      
    maxproc     709            1064           
    maxfiles    256            unlimited

Okay, let’s crank ‘er up. First let’s create /etc/launchctl.conf

$ sudo touch /etc/launchctl.conf

And let’s open it with your editor of choice. Add the following line to the new file:

limit maxfiles 16384 32768

Restart your computer. Boom. Easy.