Hi Timo thanks for your reply. I understand you're basically saying "upgrade to v2" but maybe this could be of interest for you. After we lowered the login_max_processes_count again the problem reappeared so I'm not sure whether that doesn't indicate a different problem.
Regards, Michael On Tuesday 18 October 2011 15:57:23 Timo Sirainen wrote: > On Thu, 2011-10-06 at 12:42 +0100, Michael Moritz wrote: > > Hi > > > > I've found an older thread > > http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2010-March/047886.html which mentions > > that this is a bug in version 1. I'm on Debian squeeze (1:1.2.15-7) and got > > errors like these recently > > > > Oct 5 11:29:29 mail dovecot: dovecot: pipe() failed: Too many open files > > Oct 5 11:29:32 mail dovecot: dovecot: pipe() failed: Too many open files > > Oct 5 11:29:32 mail dovecot: dovecot: Temporary failure in creating login > > processes, slowing down for now > > These errors come from the dovecot master process. Each child process > uses up a few fds for pipes. > > > As a work around I've increased login_max_processes_count from 256 to 512 > > and it seems to have helped (as I suspected stale opened files). > > That only makes it easier to reach, since now there can be more child > processes eating up more fds. > > > My colleague thinks it's hitting the kernel open file limit ulimit -n > > (currently at 1024) but I don't see how that could happen if the number of > > process is nowhere near that. > > I don't remember how many fds each process takes in v1.x, probably > between 1 and 3. So if you for a while had hundreds of imap or pop3 > processes, you could run into that limit. > > v2.x doesn't use as many fds. > >
