I’m running a (currently single-node) Docker Swarm “cluster” for hosting some light websites, which amounts to about ~200 active containers.

Recently, I’ve hit my machine’s 500000 open files limit, which quickly prompted me to do some digging. After waiting eons for lsof to finish running, I realised that for each container, dockerd & container & friends would open about 1000 files in total, consisting of the same 4-5 stdout/stderr/logging files and directories, see screenshot: https://imgur.com/mym6cKr

I was curious and this also happens, albeit with fewer (~300) files open, on some Docker Standalone servers I run.

Is this normal? What is one poor man supposed to do?

This happened on Docker 24, I updated to Docker 27 and no change.
Google searches are rather unhelpful in this regard.