[Dovecot] too many open files and v1.2

[Michael Moritz]

Hi

I've found an older thread http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2010-March/047886.html which mentions that this is a bug in version 1. I'm on Debian squeeze (1:1.2.15-7) and got errors like these recently

Oct  5 11:29:29 mail dovecot: dovecot: pipe() failed: Too many open files
Oct  5 11:29:32 mail dovecot: dovecot: pipe() failed: Too many open files
Oct  5 11:29:32 mail dovecot: dovecot: Temporary failure in creating login processes, slowing down for now

As a work around I've increased login_max_processes_count from 256 to 512 and it seems to have helped (as I suspected stale opened files).

My colleague thinks it's hitting the kernel open file limit ulimit -n (currently at 1024) but I don't see how that could happen if the number of process is nowhere near that.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Michael