I'm a new dovecot user, just began using it last week. I switched from courier because my research showed that Dovecot did indexes, and allows me to store them anywhere I chose. I did this, and it fixed some severe disk IO issues that my server had. (25k horde only webmail install using imap proxy).
I'm using quotas, and by default had it set to 'dirsize'. my postfix is already creating 'maildirsize' files, so I opted to change dovecot to use this instead.
However, when I do, I run into the "too many open files" issue that's been reported many times on the list. I've seen a lot of mention of too many open files, but I haven't seen it related to the quota type used. It's possible that simply my using 'dirsize' as the quota type slows things down enough to not have the issue? I don't really know.
Anyhow. I doubled my max open files in FreeBSD's /boot/loader.conf to: kern.maxfiles="24656", but to no avail. When I have it set to maildirsize, the open files on the system grows uncontrollably. Under normal use, it's somewhere below 5k:
sysctl -a | grep openfiles kern.openfiles: 4415
I looked into the patch mentioned here:
- http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2006-November/017536.html
- http://dovecot.org/list/dovecot-cvs/2006-November/006776.html
Those patches already appear to be in rc15, which I'm already running (Via FreeBSD's ports). I also applied the patch mentioned here awhile back:
and rebuilt, but it didn't help out either. There are also freebsd specific notes on forcing a limit on dovecot itsself using login.conf, but that wouldnt really fix anything, it would just cause dovecot to not interfere with other running daemons.
Any thoughts? TSS, you mention a few times in these notes that you're unable to reproduce this. Perhaps try with the maildir as quota?
More details about my setup:
- FreeBSD 4.8 (yea, I know)
- Imapproxy (http://www.imapproxy.org/)
- Postfix to create maildir++ maildirsize folders
- MySQL backend
The work of this is spread out between several servers, dovecot is running on the server that's the final SMTP delivery location, and has local disks with the maildirs.
--falz