I am running Dovecot 1.0rc15 on NetBSD 3.1 with only a few connections. It is built from pkgsrc-2006Q3, with mail/dovecot/ updated to HEAD. kqueue is a default build option - I haven't tried without yet.

Mail directories/indexes are on a Linux 2.6.16.29 NFS file system, I have set these options and it performs well: mmap_disable=yes lock_method=fcntl FYI. rc7 had very high CPU use with the same options, which rc15 seems to have fixed :-)

I also have this problem with dovecot-nightly-20060225 (1.0beta3) on NetBSD 2.1RC3 using a local ffs file system.

This appears in /var/log/maillog: Jan 4 18:44:42 server dovecot: pipe() failed: Too many open files

# ps ax|grep dovecot 723 ?? Ss 2:14.15 /usr/pkg/sbin/dovecot 822 ?? S 0:07.79 dovecot-auth # sysctl proc.723.rlimit proc.723.rlimit.descriptors.soft = 64 proc.723.rlimit.descriptors.hard = 1772

If I change /etc/login.conf to contain:

default|default class:
:openfiles-max=2048:
:openfiles-cur=1024:

Then login as root and /etc/rc.d/dovecot restart, the new soft limit is applied which helps but only delays the error. I haven't worked out how to make this happen automatically on restart. NOTE: hard never goes above kern.maxfiles which is 1772 (I think the kernel needs to be recompiled to increase further).

proc.21494.rlimit.descriptors.soft = 1024 proc.21494.rlimit.descriptors.hard = 1772

# fstat -p 21494 root dovecot 21494 45* pipe 0xcc4e0138 <- 0xcc4e0648 rn

Shows an increasing number of pipe files open.

This NetBSD 3.1 system is a test server which I can experiment with if there is anything further I can do to help find the problem.

Thank you, Daniel.