[Dovecot] rc7 crashing under heavy load

[billl at inetmsg.com]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chris Wakelin" <c.d.wakelin at reading.ac.uk>

> Too many open files - try increasing the number of file handles for the 
> Dovecot master process; I use "plimit -n 4096 <Dovecot master pid>"
>
> Login process died too early - are you using NIS? It's too slow for 
> Dovecot, I think. We create a Dovecot "passwd-file" from NIS overnight and 
> then "HUP" the Dovecot master process to make it re-read it (we use it 
> only for UIDs, as we use pam-ldap to Active Directory for authentication, 
> but it could have the passwords in as well). Dovecot caches the 
> passwd-file so it's very quick.

Chris,  I am new to Dovecot and this list, and struggled this weekend to get 
Dovegot to authenticate the username against a "passwd-file" and using pam 
to authenticate the passwords.  I was wondering if you could tell me what 
the format of the "passwd-file" should look like.  I want to the username to 
be user at domain, and tried stripping the domain part for username/password 
authentication against pam, but that hasn't worked for me, so I thought I 
would use a "passwd-file" like your doing.  Also, what does your 
dovecot.conf section look like for using a "passwd-file" and pam?

Thanks for any help you can provide!

Bill