[Dovecot] Error: Maximum number of mail processes exceeded (see max_mail_processes setting)

[Jack Stewart]

Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-02-05 at 11:36 -0500, Stewart Dean wrote:
>> Question: Do you have to have a radically greater setting for maildir 
>> than for mbox?  I would think...
>> What sort of values are people using with both formats?  Sounds like a 
>> nasty thing that could bite one in the $%# come migration from mbox to 
>> maildir
> 
> No, there's pretty much no difference in fd usage between mbox and
> maildir. The main problem is the Dovecot master process, since it uses
> 1-2 fds per child process.

It's more of a client/server activity and usage issue than anything 
else. Based on lsof on individual processes, there doesn't seem to be 
anything unique to maildir but I don't have any mbox or dbox experience.

O/S tweaks are no limited to dovecot, you get into these issues with 
databases and webservers. To be honest, I only knew to look into these 
issues because of settings needed to Oracle/MySQL/Apache/etc servers. 
Tuning isn't limited to just ulimit. I know of some useful RHE settings, 
but not all.

---Jack