diff --git a/README.txt b/README.txt
index 436e95e5886..118cf1a4135 100644
--- a/README.txt
+++ b/README.txt
@@ -9,3 +9,9 @@ The jetty distribution will be built in
 
   jetty-distribution/target/distribution
 
+The first build may take a long time as maven downloads all the
+dependencies.
+
+The tests do a lot of stress testing, and on some machines it is 
+neccessary to set the file descriptor limit to greater than 2048
+for the tests to all pass successfully.