[Dovecot] failed: Too many open files

[Tony Rutherford]

On 3/26/2010 4:53 AM, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On 26.3.2010, at 10.47, Masaharu Kawada wrote:
>
>    
>>> 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.
>>>        
>> According to the result of a command "ps aux", only one dovecot-auth process running on the system.
>>      
> ..
>    
>> Did you mean that this phenomenon could be a bug?
>>      
> Yes. There should be no reason for dovecot-auth to have 1024 fds open.
>
>    
>> In case it is impossible to update
>> the dovecot package, adding a line in /etc/init.d/dovecot that I wrote in my first email
>> is the only workaround to avoid the errors?
>>      
> My guess it that it takes 4 times as long for the error to show up, but it doesn't prevent it.
>
>    
Run "lsof" or something similar to see what open filedescriptors there 
are.  I ran into this same issue...and it had nothing to do with 
Dovecot...Dovecot was just unlucky enough to be requesting to open a 
file when the limit was already reached.