[Dovecot] Too many open files

[Harrison Metzger]

The version I was running was 1.0-rc15 from Redhat 5. I'm not sure how many
dovecot -auth processes were spawed. We upgraded to dovecot 1.0.10 and our
problem was solved. Unfortunately, this problem happened on a live system
and we can not put back the older version. It would appear that somwhere
between these version the problem got  resolved.

Harrison Metzger

On Jan 9, 2008 10:16 PM, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:

> On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 09:42 -0600, Harrison Metzger wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have dovecot installed and it works for about 3 hours then I get this
> > error (in /var/log/maillog):
> >
> > Jan  8 08:42:53 stu dovecot: auth(default): pam(grossmsm,69.131.100.47):
> > pipe() failed: Too many open files
> >
> > I set pam_limits.so to allow the user 'dovecot' to have 8192 open files,
> and
> > I also changed:
>
> dovecot-auth isn't (or shouldn't!) be running as "dovecot" user. See
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/UserIds. Also I don't think pam_limits settings
> matter for dovecot-auth, since it's started by dovecot master which was
> started as root, and PAM is never called in the middle. So the only
> thing that affects number of fds is "ulimit -n" value before dovecot was
> started.
>
> What Dovecot version are you using? How many dovecot-auth processes do
> you have running after a while?
>
>