Updating Mac OS X 10.6.4 Snow Leopard ‘too many files’ problem

June 16th, 2010 § 0

Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.4 has been released, and I’m sure everyone is immediately rushing to download it.

I did the same, but was left staring at the message:

The Installer encountered an error that caused the installation to fail. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance.

Retrying the Installer, booting into Safe Mode and downloading the combo update all failed to work.
Delving a little deeper into the Console log files (found by opening Console.app from Applications/Utilities, clicking ‘Logs’ and the left hand side, then install.log) revealed that my install was failing due to the message

The operation couldn’t be completed. Too many open files in system

How could this be possible? The installer was the only thing running for me, and I had plenty of RAM and disk space, so what gives?
It turns out that – from this handy post – Snow Leopard only allows each process to have a maximum of 256 files open at any one time.

You can change the defaults (as shown in the link above) by typing this command into terminal:

launchctl limit maxfiles 1000000 1000000

This will set the max files per process to 1,000,000, which is more than enough.
Trying the installer again having entered this command into terminal worked perfectly!

Let me know if it fixes your problem.

Shortening URLs in-house

May 27th, 2010 § 0

All websites now use URL extensions that redirect for easy to remember URLs.

A recent example is Google’s http://google.com/pacman – a simple / and one word is much easier to remember than say /google_pacman.html (which is still keeping it simple!)
(I’m sure if you looked into it, the files aren’t actually stored in a /pacman folder either ;) )

There are URL shortening methods out there, such as http://bit.ly and http://tiny.cc, but I feel these don’t give you enough power for customisation. And what if you have your own domain that you want to use?!
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Batch compress all files in a folder with YUI Compressor

May 24th, 2010 § 1

I’ve recently read up on the importance of site performance for search engine optimisation (SEO).

Google is saying that this year (2010) it may start using the speed your site loads as a factor in determining where your site shows up in its results list.

One great way of decreasing the load times of your site is to compress the CSS and Javascript.
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