The webapp for my project at work was receiving the error “unable to open database file” from SQLite. The error was intermittent hence it was hard to diagnose. I was using a SQLite database on a webserver running xsp2 and mono (i.e. ASP.Net). A few times I also received the error “System.IO.File: Too many files open” but this only happened once or twice.
I was running the webapp on openSUSE 11, after some dead ends I finally tried opening a large number of file descriptors from a simple console app. That’s how I discovered that by default openSUSE 11 only lets a process open ~1023 file descriptors. But xsp2 opens a large number of file descriptors when it’s serving web pages in fact this is why SQLite was giving the error “unable to open database file”. SQLite couldn’t allocated a new file descriptor for opening the database file since xsp2 had already used all of the available file descriptors. The fix is to add the following lines to /etc/security/limits.conf
* soft nofile 2048
* hard nofile 4096
To check the user file descriptor limits on unix run the command: ulimit -a
