[Dovecot] Too many open files, etc.

[Curtis Maloney]

Martin Preen wrote:
> Hello,
> a few days ago I switched out UW-server installation to
> dovecot 0.99.14 (Solaris 9). There were a few client issues,
> but mostly the migration was ok.

You know, if I had a dollar for every time I'd heard that :)  Lots of people 
seem to be leaving UW-server for Dovecot.

I, too, am running 0.99.14 on Solaris 9 (SPARC)... and loving it :)

> But I have still some questions/problems:
> 
> +) dovecot-auth: ... PAM: pipe() failed: Too many open files
> I increased the max. number of open files. Is this normal
> behaviour, that more than 512 open files are needed ?

I've never seen this problem, but I am not using PAM.  Even so, no, it doesn't 
sound normal.  Are there any messages in the logs?  How many auth tasks are 
you running?

> +) we're using mbox on NFS and index files on local disks.
> When building the index files for the first time, it takes
> (of course) a long time for large folders. But we have these
> users, and this will happen sometimes. Is there a way to
> improve performance ?

And still I ask myself "Why do people keep using mbox?" :)

Timo has spoken of a specialised Dovecot LDA for the full 1.0 release.  One of 
the features will be for it to update the indexes upon delivery.

The only other option I can think of is to hack up a quick Python script to 
connect to an account, and select each of its folders.  Hmm... perhaps I will.

> One user currently gets this error from Pine when accessing a
> large attachment: MAIL FOLDER "INBOX" CLOSED DUE TO ACCESS ERROR.
> AFAIK this error is related to some timeout problem.
> Has anyone seen this (and a solution for it) ?

Is there anything in the Dovecot logs?

--
Curtis Maloney