What does 'ulimit -n' say? That's the per-process limit. It's usually at 1024, but root can raise it for itself, and you can then su to the user you really want to run the program. You can also arrange for it to be higher by editing /etc/profile and logging in again.
Yes, it's 1024.
18000 is impossible unless the processes' ulimit -n and /proc/sys/fs/file-max are both that or higher, unless I'm seriously confused.
18000 was for all the wine processes added together. Normally when I run wine, i see in the process list "wine whatever.exe" and "wineserver". With this app, I see lots of "wine whatever.exe" processes, so I just took the sum of them.
I doubt Wine scales well to large numbers of threads or fd's. Maybe it's time to start seeing where the bottlenecks are...
I was discussing this with Mike McCormack last night on IRC. He gave me some ideas and sent me a couple of patches. As I'm not getting very far with this OLE deadlock, I think I'll look at these patches next.
thanks -mike