Apache Problem due to (24)Too many open files - Solution

After running web services on Apache for few years, my web suddenly could not be accessed because of given an error "HTTP WARNING: HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden".

When checking the Apache Error log, I found an error message as shown below.

(24)Too many open files: /var/www/html/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable

The solution to this problem is to increase the maximum number of open files and user processes by the following settings.


vim /etc/security/limits.conf 
root soft nofile 32768 
root hard nofile 32768 
root soft nproc 4096  
root hard nproc 4096