[Dovecot] failed: Too many open files

[Timo Sirainen]

On 26.3.2010, at 8.27, Masaharu Kawada wrote:

> dovecot: auth(default): pam(xxx at xxx.com,127.0.0.1): pipe() failed: Too many open files
..
>> From the above result, dovecot-auth proccess opened 10243
> files, and that seems to be the limit. So I expect that
> adding following lines into /etc/init.d/dovecot could be
> fix this issue.
..
> ulimit -n 4098    <-add

How many dovecot-auth processes were there running? Unless there were 1024 dovecot-auth processes, it sounds more like a file descriptor leak and adding more fds will only delay the error.

Anyway, the problem is only with v1.0 and I've already rewritten the PAM code, so it's fixed in newer versions at least. Too much trouble trying to debug v1.0 bugs anymore..