Is ulimit needed launching memcached with -c?

Question

If launching as root like this:

memcached -c 5000 ...

do I need my startup script to look like this:

ulimit -n 5000
memcached -c 5000 ...

Or will memcached set the max open files automatically?

Answer 1

memcached -c does not affect your user limit settings.

If you set the value for max simultaneous connections to something outside of what's permitted via ulimit then you will need to execute the ulimit command or change the limits.conf (/etc/security/limits.conf) file to allow a sufficient amount of connections/file descriptors.