dovecot - Mar 2003 - Failure in the presence of too many connections

Had an event today where dovecot refused new connections and would not
accept more until restarted, whereupon it worked for a few minutes and
locked up again.  Looking at the logs it appeared that it had run out
of file descriptors.  I increased the open files limit and started it
again-- which worked but it only pushes off the problem.

Does dovecot keep an open file descriptor for every imap or pop3
child?  If so, this would argue more towards a tcpserver sort of
control.  If not, perhaps something is leaking..

-mm-

PS: assume you saw recent RFCs 3501 and 3502 ?

On Wed, 2003-03-26 at 20:28, Mark E. Mallett wrote:
> Had an event today where dovecot refused new connections and would not
> accept more until restarted, whereupon it worked for a few minutes and
> locked up again.  Looking at the logs it appeared that it had run out
> of file descriptors.  I increased the open files limit and started it
> again-- which worked but it only pushes off the problem.
Which process ran out of fds? "dovecot"?
> Does dovecot keep an open file descriptor for every imap or pop3
> child?
No, except imap-login <-> imap does keep one open for SSL connections. 
>   If so, this would argue more towards a tcpserver sort of
> control.  If not, perhaps something is leaking..
I haven't noticed any leaks. stracing dovecot process kept the fds
pretty much the same.
> PS: assume you saw recent RFCs 3501 and 3502 ?
Yes, I've read both as drafts.