# Can't restart memcached anymore

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cant-restart-memcached-anymore/154528>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [December 1, 2008, 10:01am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cant-restart-memcached-anymore/154528 "2008-12-01T10:01:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![justus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/b2d939/32.png) [@justus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/justus)\
**Post date:** [December 1, 2008, 10:01am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cant-restart-memcached-anymore/154528/1 "2008-12-01T10:01:42Z")

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Hi,

My memcached has been working perfectly.

But all of a sudden I am not able to restart it anymore  
(RAILS\_ENV=production rake memcached:start),

getting this error message:

failed to set rlimit for open files. Try running as root or requesting  
smaller maxconns value.

This has never happened before.

Does anyone know where and how to request a ‘smaller maxconns value’?

(Running root doesn’t help me. It tells me ‘can’t run as root without  
the -u switch’… not sure what that means. Running the sudo rake task  
with ‘-u’ shows no result at all…)

Thanks a lot for any help!  
Justus