because the low limit was causing Deadlock to crash This would be the game hitting the hard file limit (ulimit -Hn) not, the soft file limit (ulimit -n). There's no good reason to be raising the soft file limit value, while raising the hard limit is useful.
yeah I became aware of that recently. at the time I just wanted the game to work, so I cranked the value, it definitely shouldn't be that high. thought it was worth reporting anyways in case someone else makes the same mistake, since I couldn't find error output that indicated the issue.
Nothing extracted yet.
Your system information
Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:
When using a file descriptor limit of 100000, steam launches as expected. However, if I set my file descriptor limit to unlimited (ulimit -n shows 2147483584), the launch process will get stuck and the UI will never open.
This issue did not exist until a recent Steam Client update, I believe within the past week. I first raised my file descriptor limit 3 weeks ago, because the low limit was causing Deadlock to crash. Steam worked fine for a while after this, with the issue only occurring for the last few days.
Steps for reproducing this issue: