echo "* soft nofile 32768" | sudo tee -a /etc/security/limits.conf echo "* hard nofile 32768" | sudo tee -a /etc/security/limits.conf echo "root soft nofile 32768" | sudo tee -a /etc/security/limits.conf echo echo "root hard nofile 32768" | sudo tee -a /etc/security/limits.conf Another, much less likely possibility, is a file descriptor leak in Cassandra. See if the number of file descriptors opened by java