macOS 13.5 no longer allows setting system wide ulimits

I am currently not able to change the ulimit on my machine. As of the newest MacOs releases (11.7.9, 12.6.8, and 13.5) I am no longer able to increase the ulimit of my computer using the strategies outlined here:

• https://wilsonmar.github.io/maximum-limits/
• https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/453050/how-to-increase-global-maxfiles-ulimit-on-osx-13-1-ventura?newreg=44fe471004094ccdb3ba51c1c3f9f84a

Running sudo launchctl limit maxfiles 65536 200000 returns Could not set resource limits: 150: Operation not permitted while System Integrity Protection is engaged.

This is relevant for me as I am using Vite which is currently broken and blocks me from developing locally. It is mentioned in their troubleshooting page (https://vitejs.dev/guide/troubleshooting.html#requests-are-stalled-forever) that Vite causes a large number of open files and how to increase the limit. There are similar comments in the Ruby Vite troubleshooting page (https://vite-ruby.netlify.app/guide/troubleshooting.html#requests-to-vite-sporadically-return-a-500-error-response). I have added a comment in the Vite discussion board about this issue.

There is a discussion the Apple Stack Exchange that reports this problem but no one has provided a solution yet (https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/462489/how-to-increase-global-max-opened-files-limit-on-osx-13-5-ventura)

Changing a system-wide setting to work around an issue with a specific product seems rather extreme. A better option would be to change it for that process specifically. If you have access to the code, add a call to setrlimit. If you don’t have access to the code, you could work out how the code is launched and add a wrapper, using either a shell script (and hence ulimit) or a native executable (setrlimit again).

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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple


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Vite isn’t the only tool affected.

Maven also fails on any moderately sized project as well since any non-trivial project can require more than 256 open files for compilation.

Is there another solution that can be applied systemwide instead of writing wrappers for each tool I notice that is broken after 13.5?

Is there another solution that can be applied systemwide … ?

There is no direct replacement for the previous launchctl mechanism. The fact that this was placed behind a SIP barrier indicates that this is not accidental.

IMO there are three paths forward:

• If you hit this limit running programs from a shell, use ulimit to change the settings in your shell. You can do this either interactively or in your profile.

• If you hit this with a GUI app, I recommend that you discuss this with the app’s vendor.

• If you hit this with some sort of Unix-y daemon or agent, you can tweak the settings in its launchd property list. You might also want to raise this with the program’s vendor, because having a configuration option for this would make sense.

Share and Enjoy


—


Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple


let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"