#10 "The process file table is full" error

[Marco Alberoni]

Hello, we are using OpenSSH 3.8.1p1 on AIX 5.2.
Sometimes a connection fails with the following error
message:

May 5 12:22:14 sp001 sshd[4649156]: error: openpty:
The process file table is full.

It should be a max-open-files problem, but we saw that
the "per process" (65535) limit wasn't reached (lsof
showed a total of about 9000 open files for _all_
active processes. What can be the real problem?

Yours sincerely
Marco Alberoni