Indexing a lot of documents?

[Jordan Hayes]

New user here, and I ran into a problem trying to load a lot of 
documents (~900k).  I tried to load them all at once, which seemed to 
run for a long time and then finally crap out with "Too many open files" 
... so I read in an FAQ that "about 100" might be a good number.  I 
split my documents up and added <commit/> to the end of each batch, and 
got about 10k into it before getting that error again.

Am I just doing something wrong?  And: is there a way to just hand the 
XML file to Solr without having to POST it?

Thanks,

/jordan