The following error occurred a lot in /var/log/nginx/error.log:

Too many open files

This means that the nginx master process reached the maximum number of open files which was set to the default of 4096. (To check it, simply cat /proc/pid/limits, where pid is the process id)

To resolve, this, edit /lib/systemd/system/nginx.service and add the following line:

LimitNOFILE=30000 #change it according to your needs

Then reload the systemctl daemon:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

and finally restart the nginx service:

sudo service nginx restart

That’s it, the error is gone!

Tested on Ubuntu 16.04 with nginx 1.17, should work with any other OS using systemd.

Enjoy!

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