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

[Timo Sirainen]

Are you sure /etc/profile gets read, especially during boot? I'm not
that sure.. Anyway you can verify that the changes took place with:

cat /proc/`pidof dovecot`/limits|grep files

On Fri, 2009-02-06 at 17:07 +0000, Jake Grimmett wrote:
> 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
> 
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