"Chances are your OS and nginx can handle more than “ulimit -a” will report, so we’ll set this high so nginx will never have an issue with “too many open files”

"Chances are your OS and nginx can handle more than “ulimit -a” will report, so we’ll set this high so nginx will never have an issue with “too many open files”" If the limit is a hard limit it doesn't really matter what nginx decides to do, does it? I had to increase the limit by hand, outside of nginx.