[Dovecot] failed: Too many open files

[Masaharu Kawada]

Hi Timo-san,

Thank you very much for your response!

 >How many dovecot-auth processes were there running? Unless there were 
1024 dovecot-auth processes, it sounds
 >more like a file descriptor leak and adding more fds will only delay 
the error.

According to the result of a command "ps aux", only one dovecot-auth 
process running on the system.
Here is the output of the "ps aux".

---
root      7273  0.0  0.0   1860   612 ?        Ss    2009   9:10 
/usr/sbin/dovecot
root      7346  0.0  0.7 141336 132880 ?       S     2009 158:18 
dovecot-auth
.
.
dovecot   8867  0.dovecot   8867  0.0  0.0   4804  1756 ?        S    
15:54   0:00 pop3-login
dovecot   8886  0.0  0.0   4808  1456 ?        S    15:54   0:00 pop3-login
dovecot   8887  0.0  0.0   4804  1456 ?        S    15:54   0:00 pop3-login
0  0.0   4804  1756 ?        S    15:54   0:00 pop3-login
dovecot   8886  0.0  0.0   4808  1456 ?        S    15:54   0:00 pop3-login
dovecot   8887  0.0  0.0   4804  1456 ?        S    15:54   0:00 pop3-login
---

Did you mean that this phenomenon could be a bug?  In case it is 
impossible to update
the dovecot package, adding a line in /etc/init.d/dovecot that I wrote 
in my first email
is the only workaround to avoid the errors?

Sincerely,


Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On 26.3.2010, at 8.27, Masaharu Kawada wrote:
>
>   
>> dovecot: auth(default): pam(xxx at xxx.com,127.0.0.1): pipe() failed: Too many open files
>>     
> ..
>   
>>> From the above result, dovecot-auth proccess opened 10243
>>>       
>> files, and that seems to be the limit. So I expect that
>> adding following lines into /etc/init.d/dovecot could be
>> fix this issue.
>>     
> ..
>   
>> ulimit -n 4098    <-add
>>     
>
> How many dovecot-auth processes were there running? Unless there were 1024 dovecot-auth processes, it sounds more like a file descriptor leak and adding more fds will only delay the error.
>
> Anyway, the problem is only with v1.0 and I've already rewritten the PAM code, so it's fixed in newer versions at least. Too much trouble trying to debug v1.0 bugs anymore..
>
>