title: Changing ulimit on Amazon EC2
body: <p>Is there a way to increase the ulimit -n (open files) for an Amazon EC2 instance? I am running an amazon m3.2xlarge ubuntu instance for testing purposes. The ulimit -Hn is 4096 but I need over 10k. I have even tried temporarily getting higher instance types but no luck.</p>
  
  <p>I have googled around for quite a while but there are only topics on this that are a few years old. Most suggest changing the limits.conf file found in /etc/security/limits.conf but the limit is read only so I cannot change permissions.</p>
  
  <p>Are there any alternative ways to change this ?  </p>
  
  <p>Edit - my etc/security/limits.conf file </p>
  
  <pre><code>#*               soft    core            0
  #root            hard    core            100000
  root            soft    nofile          16500
  root            hard    nofile          16500
  #*               hard    rss             10000
  #@student        hard    nproc           20
  #@faculty        soft    nproc           20
  #@faculty        hard    nproc           50
  #ftp             hard    nproc           0
  #ftp             -       chroot          /ftp
  #@student        -       maxlogins       4
  </code></pre>