Is there a way to increase the ulimit -n (open files) for an Amazon EC2 instance? I am running an amazon m3.2xlarge ubuntu instance for testing purposes. The ulimit -Hn is 4096 but I need over 10k. I have even tried temporarily getting higher instance types but no luck.
I have googled around for quite a while but there are only topics on this that are a few years old. Most suggest changing the limits.conf file found in /etc/security/limits.conf but the limit is read only so I cannot change permissions.
Are there any alternative ways to change this ?
Edit - my etc/security/limits.conf file
#* soft core 0
#root hard core 100000
root soft nofile 16500
root hard nofile 16500
#* hard rss 10000
#@student hard nproc 20
#@faculty soft nproc 20
#@faculty hard nproc 50
#ftp hard nproc 0
#ftp - chroot /ftp
#@student - maxlogins 4
If you set up the instance or you have sudo privileges, you can change those configuration files. Just prepend your command to open the file with sudo, (example sudo vi /etc/security/limits.conf).