[Dovecot] And again... too many open files

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2010-10-06 at 16:58 +0200, Joseba Torre wrote:
> On Miércoles 06 Octubre 2010 16:11:27 Timo Sirainen escribió:
> > These limits don't affect Dovecot at all, because they're for users that
> > are actually logging in (via PAM). System services get their limits
> > elsewhere.
> 
> Ops! I thought limits.conf was a semi-official answer for this issue. But 
> you're right, I've been playing with it and looking at /proc/$PID/limits and 
> it has no influence. It works for initial dovecot process (run by root), 

Really? It does change it then. Maybe the "*" line? I'm pretty sure the
"dovecot" lines don't..

> but not for the imap-login or pop3-login ones.

That's because these processes calculate the max. number of needed fds
and drops the limit automatically.

Are you actually seeing error messages about actually running of fds? I
thought the problem was:

> "Warning: fd limit 1024 is lower than what Dovecot can use under full
> load"

This is checked only at startup when running the master process. And if
dovecot process's fd limit is higher than 1024, then I'd think this
error message goes away?..