Oh, man. At my last job, we had a MySQL instance that kept falling over. It turns out that someone was dividing a table up with tons of partitions, and MySQL c

Oh, man. At my last job, we had a MySQL instance that kept falling over. It turns out that someone was dividing a table up with tons of partitions, and MySQL creates a new data file for each partition. The MySQL instance created several hundred file descriptors while trying to open each one of these files, and "mysteriously" crashed.