[dovecot] Failure in the presence of too many connections

Had an event today where dovecot refused new connections and would not accept more until restarted, whereupon it worked for a few minutes and locked up again. Looking at the logs it appeared that it had run out of file descriptors. I increased the open files limit and started it again-- which worked but it only pushes off the problem.

Does dovecot keep an open file descriptor for every imap or pop3 child? If so, this would argue more towards a tcpserver sort of control. If not, perhaps something is leaking..

-mm-

PS: assume you saw recent RFCs 3501 and 3502 ?