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).
<br><br>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.<br><br>However, when I do, I run into the &quot;too many open files&quot; 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.
<br><br>Anyhow. I doubled my max open files in FreeBSD's /boot/loader.conf to: kern.maxfiles=&quot;24656&quot;, 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:
<br><br>sysctl -a | grep openfiles<br>kern.openfiles: 4415<br><br><br>I looked into the patch mentioned here:<br><br>- <a href="http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2006-November/017536.html">http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2006-November/017536.html
</a><br>- <a href="http://dovecot.org/list/dovecot-cvs/2006-November/006776.html">http://dovecot.org/list/dovecot-cvs/2006-November/006776.html</a><br><br>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:
<br><br>- <a href="http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2005-June/007647.html">http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2005-June/007647.html</a><br><br>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.<br><br>- <a href="http://www.mail-archive.com/ports@openbsd.org/msg08646.html">http://www.mail-archive.com/ports@openbsd.org/msg08646.html
</a><br><br>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?<br><br>More details about my setup:<br><br>- FreeBSD 4.8 (yea, I know)<br>
- Imapproxy (<a href="http://www.imapproxy.org/">http://www.imapproxy.org/</a>)<br>- Postfix to create maildir++ maildirsize folders<br>- MySQL backend<br><br>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.
<br><br>--falz<br>