On Jun 8, 2009, at 3:35 PM, Scott Haneda wrote:
I will be deploying Dovecot on OS X shortly. I am looking for
clarification on the limits imposed by OS X and sysctl
[kern.maxproc]. I understand that it is defaulting to 532, but
can be raised to 2500. I believe the OS uses around 100 or so,
plus I will have other processes and shells at times.Which version of OS X? 10.4 or 10.5 ? Server or client ? It
matters.My current target for deployment is a Dual 2.0 PPC G5, running OS X
10.5 client. Thank you.
From http://www.postfix.org/TUNING_README.html#proc_limit
I would presume relevant to Dovecot as well:
===
Tuning the number of processes on the system
MacOS X will run out of process slots when you increase Postfix process limits. The following works with OSX 10.4 and OSX 10.5.
MacOS X kernel parameters can be specified in /etc/sysctl.conf.
/etc/sysctl.conf:
kern.maxproc=2048
kern.maxprocperuid=2048
Unfortunately these can't simply be set on the fly with "sysctl -w". You also have to set the following in /etc/launchd.conf
so that the root user after boot will have the right process limit
(2048). Otherwise you have to always run ulimit -u 2048 as root, then
start a user shell, and then start processes for things to take effect.
/etc/launchd.conf:
limit maxproc 2048
Once these are in place, reboot the system. After that, the limits will stay in place.
Hope it helps,
B. Bodger