[Dovecot] rc7 crashing under heavy load

[Jeff A. Earickson]

Help!

Our students are back and they are pounding my dovecot server
to death (ie "Login process died too early - shutting down" or
"too many open files" type crash).  I've had my third crash
today.

My setup: Solaris 10, imap and imaps, 3K users coming in via horde
webmail.  My current connection settings are:

login_max_processes_count = 2048
login_max_connections = 4096

Q: Does raising these limits actually make my problem worse or better? 
Are
there any other variables that I should change to
prevent the "too many open files"?  Suggestions?

Jeff Earickson
Colby College