[Dovecot] Too many open files, etc.

[Remy Zandwijk]

> a few days ago I switched out UW-server installation to
> dovecot 0.99.14 (Solaris 9). There were a few client issues,
> but mostly the migration was ok.
> 
> But I have still some questions/problems:
> 
> +) dovecot-auth: ... PAM: pipe() failed: Too many open files
> I increased the max. number of open files. Is this normal
> behaviour, that more than 512 open files are needed ?

Martin,

we're dealing with the same problem right now. We are using
dovecot 1.0 stable and we migrated last weekend.

32-bit processes in Solaris 9 have 256 filedescriptors avail-
able. This seems a bit to small. Using this command to get the
number of file descriptors used by dovecot:

ls -1 /proc/`cat /var/run/dovecot/master.pid`/fd | wc

In our enviroment this is currently around 390. You can limit
the number of file descriptors per process in Solaris 9.

After starting Dovecot, we issued the command:

	plimit -n 8192,8192 `cat /var/run/dovecot/master.pid`

This gives Dovecot 8192 filedescriptors.


HTH,
Remy