Question on allocation of file structures

[Christian Goetze]

I am having a problem running samba with clearcase. It seems that
clearcase will open many files at once - I'm not sure if it closes
them at some point, but the behaviour I'm observing is the following:

I run a little test program that will create many view private files.
Once MAX_OPEN_FILES is reached, my script hangs a little and sometimes
the open will fail, sometimes it will continue with the next batch
until a multiple of MAX_OPEN_FILES (minus one) is reached, where it
will again sometimes fail or succeed after a short wait.

It would almost seem that samba is doing some garbage collection and
is racing with some timeout feature inside clearcase and/or the NT
share manager (or whatever the thingy is called).

I can of course increase MAX_OPEN_FILES, but I don't think this is a
practical solution.

My question to you experts is: Is there garbage collection with those
file structures? Is there a way to increase the timeout on the NT
side? Is the timeout inside samba? 

I do notice that the log will contain an 

ERROR! Out of file structures - perhaps increase MAX_OPEN_FILES?

message.