On Fri, 2008-05-09 at 10:18 -0700, Jason Fesler wrote:
May 8 20:53:11 goat dovecot: Fatal: imap-login: Can't load certificate file /www/certs/mail.gigo.com.cert: error:02001018:system library:fopen:Too many open files
But this (or some other error) didn't happen immediately?
Correct. It happened after some number of connection. Using "lsof", I could not see any that limits were being realistically hit, either.
That error happens at startup, and there should be a fixed number of fds open at that time. Only reason I can think of is if master process leaks some fds to login process. You could verify this by building Dovecot with configure --enable-debug. Then it checks fd leaks at startup, and logs an error and dies if there are any.
Unfortunately I have just one ipv6 freebsd 7 machine to work with :-( and mail is supposed to be a production service. I'll have another opportunity to do more on June 14, when downtime is scheduled for another location. At that time I'll get that location's OS updated, onto ipv6, and since it is just two (flexible) people, I'll have more room to play.
It would be possible to also install a test installation elsewhere (configure --prefix=/tmp/dovecot-test) and run it on different ports.