I've always followed the instructions here, which should set the global values properly. You can check by issuing a ulimit -n
(N.B. I had to include ulimit -n 65535
in my .profile — for some reason named users don't require this but root does.)
Don't forget to recompile httperf. Before doing make install
issue a ./httperf -v | grep maximum
— you should see 65535. If not, something went wrong.
I am working on a similar project (httperf 0.9.0 on Ubuntu 12.04) but I am having some difficulty getting httperf to actually compile properly. I'm sure I've forgotten something basic, but let me know how you fare. EDIT: Realized my problem was a library version incompatibility. I imported the binary built on a different server and it works fine.