After upgrading to Neo4j 1.6 today I got this warning when starting the server:
Detected a limit of 512 for maximum open files.
A limit of 40000 is suggested instead and a quick look on Google suggests the use of launchctl limit or ulimit -n. However the results I found were split between how Linux deals with this issue (ulimit -n) and pre Lion fixes that involve using unlimited as the hard limit (which hasn’t worked since Leopard).
Setting a higher limit on lion is fairly simple. Edit launchd.conf like so (it might not exist):
sudo vim /etc/launchd.conf
Then add this line to it:
limit maxfiles 1000000 1000000
This tells Lion to set both the soft and hard limit (in that order) to 1000000. I picked such a high value to avoid any issues of the same nature in the future.
Make sure you restart afterwards for the changes to take effect.