but the solution is to just bump the soft limit of open file descriptors in my shell As you can see the max value reached is around 1600, which is way above th

but the solution is to just bump the soft limit of open file descriptors in my shell As you can see the max value reached is around 1600, which is way above the previous limit of 256. Without asking and answering "why the hell does it need to keep so many files open", I don't think that's a good way to do things. Raising the limit is justified only if there is a real reason why the process needs to have that many files open simultaneously.