Linux and File Descriptors

I confess to being confused about Informix on Linux and the issue regarding the number of file descriptors. I'm running 7.30-UC7 on the Slackware 7.0 distribution, which is a 2.2.13 kernel. It hasn't been up but a couple of days, but seems to be doing well. Previously I was running 7.30-UC5 on Red Hat 5.2, with the FD number patch, and it did well also, although with the occasional random disconnect others have reported. But as others have noted, something fills up syslog with messages reading 'dupfd' fd <some number> max 1024. They seem to occur in huge batches when Informix starts or shuts down, as if something were hunting for the valid number of FDs. The number of system-wide FDs is 4096 by default (cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max). Increasing that number seems fairly pointless. There are smaller limits on the number of FDs and the number of open files per process, but they are compiled into the kernel. What precisely is Informix looking for, and what is the result if it doesn't get it? Dwight Rudolph dwight@rudolph.com