Safari on M1 Max Monterey: "Too many open files"

Question

Level 1

13 points

Safari on M1 Max Monterey: "Too many open files"

Hi,

Last week I got an M1 Max MacBook Pro 16" with 64 GB of RAM (macOS Monterey 12.0.1). About every two hours or so, Safari stops working and shows this error when I want to open a URL in a new tab:

Safari can't open the page. The error is: "The operation couldn't be completed. Too

many open files" (NSPOSIXErrorDomain:24)

I quit Safari then and reopen it, and it works for another two hours.

I started my Mac from scratch, didn't use Migration Assistant, Time Machine, or any other backup. All other software works just fine. This error didn't happen on my old 2016 MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM.

I followed the troubleshooting steps outlined here, except for startup in safe mode. None of them helped. I also disabled all my extensions - no luck either. Everything else works, including Chrome, which happily runs for days on end.

How can I fix this?

Regards,

Karsten Silz

MacBook Pro (2020 and later)

Posted on Nov 25, 2021 2:25 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 26, 2021 6:49 AM in response to Karsten Silz

Greetings Karsten Silz,

We understand that you are having some difficulty with Safari on your Mac, and we'd like to help. Begin by following the guidance found here:

If Safari on Mac doesn't open a webpage or isn’t working as expected

Take care.

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Answer 2

Nov 26, 2021 8:29 AM in response to Matthew.S81

Hi,

At our company we have also got 4 new MacBook Pro laptops with 16GB of RAM and all of them are on Monterey 12.0.1 and all of them have the same issue described by the author. Although, we have issues while trying to run different software (in our case we are trying to install and run nix-shell) but the type of software to run looks to be irrelevant in this case.

While trying to fix this we updated max open files setting and updated hard/soft limits to 1000000 (although it is impossible for our software to use that many files) but nothing fixes the issue. We are pretty sure this setting is either completely ignored by the new OS (Monterey) or something else needs to be adjusted.

Need to mention that we also have couple of MacBook laptops that run on Big Sur and we never had such issues with those (max open files are set to 2560 (ulimit -a) by default and we have not changed that).

Assuming all of this, we suppose that there is an issue with the new Monterey OS that is not present on older versions of OS. We appreciate any feedback on this!

Thank you,

Alexander

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Answer 3

Karsten Silz Author

Level 1

13 points

Nov 27, 2021 12:16 PM in response to Matthew.S81

These general troubleshooting steps didn't help: Emptied caches, disabled all extensions, rebooted, started with "Shift" pressed. These errors even seem to occur when I don't actively use Safari. I'm switching to Chrome as my standard browser until this is fixed.

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Answer 4

Karsten Silz Author

Level 1

13 points

Dec 7, 2021 8:00 AM in response to Matthew.S81

I did contact support. They asked me to create a new user on my Mac and see if the issue shows there. If it does, they'd recommend either rebuilding my Mac from scratch or returning it (since I just got it a couple of weeks ago).

I'll try the new user next week. But I'm not going to rebuild my Mac: I built it from scratch to not carry over any old Intel stuff, and it took a couple of days. I'm not going to do that again. Neither am I to return it - it would take about two months to get a new one, plus setting it up. I'd stick with Chrome and use Safari only if I have to.

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