[Dovecot] help: "dovecot: pipe() failed: Too many open files"

[Jake Grimmett]

Hi Mark,

taking your advice, I've put "ulimit -n 8192 > /dev/null 2>&1" 
into /etc/profile. The problem is horribly intermittent, so it's now just a 
question of waiting...

Anyhow, many thanks for the tip - I'll post something to the list if the 
problem comes back !

Jake

On Friday 06 February 2009 15:24, you wrote:
> I reported a bug like this on 23rd Dec last year and Timo replied 8/1
> this year. However, I've seen this bug very infrequently and I'm not
> sure that you're hitting it - it's more likely that your ulimit -n is
> too low - try setting it to around 8192 (defaults to 1024 I think). It
> should be around 3* max conns you expect to be on the safe side of
> things.
>
> Mark
>
> --
> Mark Zealey -- Shared Hosting Team Leader
> Product Development * Webfusion
> 123-reg.co.uk, webfusion.co.uk, donhost.co.uk, supanames.co.uk
>
> This mail is subject to http://www.gxn.net/disclaimer
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: dovecot-bounces+mark.zealey=webfusion.com at dovecot.org
> > [mailto:dovecot-bounces+mark.zealey=webfusion.com at dovecot.org]
> >  On Behalf Of Jake Grimmett
> > Sent: 06 February 2009 15:15
> > To: dovecot at dovecot.org
> > Subject: [Dovecot] help: "dovecot: pipe() failed: Too many open files"
> >
> > Dear All,
> >
> > I'm having an intermittent problem, with dovecot slowing to a crawl.
> > Restarting dovecot fixes the problem.
> >
> > Looking at the maillog, I see loads of these errors....
> >
> > dovecot: pipe() failed: Too many open files
> > dovecot: Temporary failure in creating login processes,
> > slowing down for now
> > dovecot: Created login processes successfully, unstalling
> >
> > looking at the processes, I can see ~200 imap-login's and
> > about ~700 imap's
> > there are 1000 email accounts on the server - half of which
> > are in regular
> > use.
> >
> > The server is Dell PE1950 running dovecot (1.0.7-2.el5) as
> > supplied with
> > Centos 5.2 (~Redhat AS 5.2) in 64 bit mode. I've upgraded the
> > server from 4
> > to 8GB of RAM, and from a dual core 1.5Ghz xeon, to a quad
> > core 1.5GHz xeon,
> > and this does not seem to help.
> >
> > The following settings were increased by me to try and stop
> > this problem - but
> > did not have an obvious effect:
> >
> > login_process_size = 128
> > login_process_per_connection = yes
> > login_max_processes_count = 512
> >
> > Other parameters were left commented out:
> >
> > #max_mail_processes = 1024
> > #auth_process_size = 256
> >
> >
> > If anyone has any ideas about where I might be going wrong,
> > please let me
> > know..!
> >
> > many thanks
> >
> > Jake
> >
> > --
> > Dr Jake Grimmett
> > Head Of Scientific Computing
> > MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
> > Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 0QH, UK.
> > Phone 01223 402219
> > Mobile 0776 9886539

-- 
Dr Jake Grimmett
Head Of Scientific Computing
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 0QH, UK.
Phone 01223 402219
Mobile 0776 9886539