Question: Do you have to have a radically greater setting for maildir than for mbox? I would think... What sort of values are people using with both formats? Sounds like a nasty thing that could bite one in the $%# come migration from mbox to maildir

Frank Bonnet wrote:

Jack Stewart wrote:

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Frank Bonnet wrote:

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Hello

I have this message repeated several times each *seconds* in /var/log/dovecot/dovecot.log

the max_mail_processes is set to 8192 and I can see an average of 500 imap processes on the machine , I think there is a problem somewhere ...

Debian 64 bits , IBM X3650 biproc , 7 Gb RAM , RAID5 disks , 2 ethernet Gb ports bonded.

Dovecot 1.1.11 has been compiled from scratch on the machine

Thanks for any info.

Hi Frank,

Your system is plenty powerful - no issues there.

What are your settings in the init script? I found that putting in a ulimit -n 8192 and ulimit -f 16384 prior to invoking dovecot was worthwhile on my system.

I would first try tweaking these settings in a root shell and then invoke dovecot with a -c conf make sure it is picking up the right conf file.

I'm sure the list will ask for the dovecot -n -c ... output as well.

---Jack

Bingo ! since the begining I was modifying the wrong configuration file ....

now everything is clear , when I modified the right file the OS instant write to the shell I haven't enough file descriptors ...

Shame on me and thanks a lot Jack !

Frank

-- ==== Once upon a time, the Internet was a friendly, neighbors-helping-neighbors small town, and no one locked their doors. Now it's like an apartment in Bed-Stuy: you need three heavy duty pick-proof locks, one of those braces that goes from the lock to the floor, and bars on the windows.... ==== Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Bard College, New York 12504 sdean@bard.edu voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035

Timo Sirainen wrote:

On Thu, 2009-02-05 at 11:36 -0500, Stewart Dean wrote:

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Question: Do you have to have a radically greater setting for maildir than for mbox? I would think... What sort of values are people using with both formats? Sounds like a nasty thing that could bite one in the $%# come migration from mbox to maildir

No, there's pretty much no difference in fd usage between mbox and maildir. The main problem is the Dovecot master process, since it uses 1-2 fds per child process.

It's more of a client/server activity and usage issue than anything else. Based on lsof on individual processes, there doesn't seem to be anything unique to maildir but I don't have any mbox or dbox experience.

O/S tweaks are no limited to dovecot, you get into these issues with databases and webservers. To be honest, I only knew to look into these issues because of settings needed to Oracle/MySQL/Apache/etc servers. Tuning isn't limited to just ulimit. I know of some useful RHE settings, but not all.

---Jack