[Dovecot] Re: dovecot died

[Trent Lloyd]

Marten Lehmann <lehmann <at> cnm.de> writes: 
 
>  
> Hello, 
>  
> today our dovecot imap server died. The following message appeared in  
> the logfile: 
>  
> dovecot: Mar 23 07:00:58 Error: pipe() failed: Too many open files 
>  
> We have one dovecot instance for pop3 and one for imap, so while the  
> pop3-service was still available, the imap-service was not running any more. 
>  
> I've seen a lots of users keeping there imap-connections idle for hours,  
> often more than one per mailbox. How can I limit this? Can I limit the  
> maximum time a connection can be open? 
>  
> Regards 
> Marten 
>  
>  
 
You could look at inreasing the file limits, on debian its 
in /etc/security/limits.conf, increase the default 'nofile' from 1024 to say, 
20000 or something. 
 
No idea what it is in other distros, running 'ulimit -n 20000' before starting 
dovecot (as root) may help too. 
 
Cheers, 
Trent