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John
Asked: 2020-09-21 23:43:10 +0800 CST

How to set ulimit for AWS SSM agent on EC2?

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I want to increase the permitted number of open files for processes started by AWS SSM agent. I have added to /etc/security/limits.conf:

*  -  nofile  65535

(I am aware that this is for all users). When I log in to the server and run ulimit -n, I see the new limit of 65536. However, when I run an SSM RunCommand:

id && ulimit -n

I see the following in the logs:

uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root) 1024

It would appear that amazon-ssm-agent is not picking up the new settings. I can see that the daemon process is running as root, however.

$ ps -ef | grep ssm
root      4843     1  0 07:30 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/amazon-ssm-agent

How do I increase the ulimit value?

linux amazon-ec2 amazon-web-services

1 Answers

  1. You have to close all active sessions windows to get the new value picked up. The easiest way to achieve this would be to reboot the server. If that is not an option you can also adjust the value for the ssm-agent process by using:

    prlimit --pid <pid> --<limit>=<soft>:<hard>

    So something like:

    prlimit --pid 4843 --nofile=65535:65535

    should set the soft and hard limit for the ssm-agent process to 65535 without rebooting the server.

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