[Dovecot] dovecot: pipe() failed: Too many open files

[Timo Sirainen]

On Dec 18, 2009, at 5:46 PM, JW wrote:

> I'm sorry, I forgot to specify that I was using Debian Linux:
> 
> 
>        echo -n "Starting $DESC: $NAME"
>        ulimit -n 8192
>        start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --oknodo --exec $DAEMON

Well, this seemed to work in Debian unstable.. So maybe the problem is that something just causes Dovecot to eat all available file descriptors. When it happens again you should get the lsof output of dovecot and save it.

Also you never mentioned your Dovecot version. It's possible it's already been fixed in recent versions.

>> ? Many Linux distros override ulimit 
>> in their internal scripts. If you're using Linux, you could check if
>> dovecot process really has 8192 limit:
>> 
>> cat /proc/`pidof dovecot`/limits | grep 'Max open'
> 
> 
> I've seen this suggestion on the web a few times, but there's no such 
> directory, /proc/`pidof dovecot`/limits or /proc/*/limits for that matter

I guess you've old enough kernel that it doesn't support it.