[ale] practical file-max limits?

[jenn at colormaria.com]

I've got a mail server that can potentially get 10,000 or more simultaneous
delivery requests (not often, but I did crash it last night trying to
deliver to 8000 users at once).  My file-max limit is set at 8192, which is
standard default at least on RedHat boxen.

I read on linuxdoc.org that "We generally tune this file to improve the
number of open files by increasing the value of /proc/sys/fs/file-max to
something reasonable like 256 for every 4M of RAM we have"

I've got 896MB RAM in this machine.  Which, following linuxdoc's equation,
results in:
896/4 = 224*256 = 57344

That's a substantial increase in number of available open files.  Is this
sane?  Anyone ever done this?  Any considerations other than RAM that I
should be aware of?

TIA
jenn


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