[Dovecot] auth server refusing connections intermittently

[Steven F Siirila]

Running Dovecot 1.0-rc27 on Solaris 10..

We have been noticing intermittent messages of this sort and wondered if
this indicates whether we need to add more dovecot-auth worker processes:

Mar 28 03:15:41 myhost dovecot: pop3-login: Can't connect to auth server at default: Connection refused
Mar 28 08:10:20 myhost dovecot: imap-login: Can't connect to auth server at default: Connection refused
Mar 28 09:08:13 myhost dovecot: imap-login: Can't connect to auth server at default: Connection refused
Mar 28 10:23:38 myhost dovecot: imap-login: Can't connect to auth server at default: Connection refused
Mar 28 10:35:37 myhost dovecot: imap-login: Can't connect to auth server at default: Connection refused
Mar 28 10:50:59 myhost dovecot: imap-login: Can't connect to auth server at default: Connection refused
Mar 28 12:00:44 myhost dovecot: pop3-login: Can't connect to auth server at default: Connection refused
Mar 28 12:07:31 myhost dovecot: imap-login: Can't connect to auth server at default: Connection refused
Mar 28 14:44:57 myhost dovecot: imap-login: Can't connect to auth server at default: Connection refused

However, this system has over 7,000 users and 1,500 simultaneous IMAP
and POP3 connections, and we only see one dovecot-auth process running.
By contrast, another server has over 11,000 users and 3,000 simultaneous
IMAP and POP3 connections (but is currently running rc24), and we only
have seen 3 of the above error messages there -- and there is only one
dovecot-auth process there as well.  Does this sound right?

Also, how many times are these connections retried (and at what sleep
interval, if any) before it gives up?

-- 

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