I am having trouble getting enough file handles, since it can sometimes use more than 256. Solaris' 32-bit stdio seems to be the source of the problem, even though Solaris 8 can support a bajillion per process. 
host> ulimit -a
time(seconds)        unlimited
file(blocks)         unlimited
data(kbytes)         unlimited
stack(kbytes)        8192
coredump(blocks)     unlimited
nofiles(descriptors) 3072
vmemory(kbytes)      unlimited

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The code below fails at 256, although ulimit would indicate that it shouldn't 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use FileHandle;

for ($i=0;$i<2048;$i++){
        $fd = new IO::File;
        sysopen($fd, "$i", O_WRONLY | O_CREAT) or die "stopped at: $i:
+ $!\n";
        $fd{"$i"} = $fd;
}
for ($i=0;$i<2048;$i++){
        $fh = $fd{"$i"};
        print $fh "test\n";
}

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How to proceed? We built perl 5.8 with    useperlio=define d_sfio=undef but that didn't work, presumably because perlio uses stdio. Any experience with sfio, or any indication that it will solve the problem? It seems that 64-bit perl would use the 64-bit stdio libraries that are not broken, but we need DBD::Oracle, and that seems to require 64-bit Oracle, and we are not quite there yet.

In reply to Need lots of filehandles under Solaris by st_imbob

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