Hello, a few days ago I switched out UW-server installation to dovecot 0.99.14 (Solaris 9). There were a few client issues, but mostly the migration was ok. But I have still some questions/problems: +) dovecot-auth: ... PAM: pipe() failed: Too many open files I increased the max. number of open files. Is this normal behaviour, that more than 512 open files are needed ? +) we're using mbox on NFS and index files on local disks. When building the index files for the first time, it takes (of course) a long time for large folders. But we have these users, and this will happen sometimes. Is there a way to improve performance ? +) in general dovecot saves a lot of NFS-bandwidth compared to UW-imap. Thats what I was looking for. But there also seems to be a problem with large inboxes (> 10 MB) and/or large attachments. Is this right ? One user currently gets this error from Pine when accessing a large attachment: MAIL FOLDER "INBOX" CLOSED DUE TO ACCESS ERROR. AFAIK this error is related to some timeout problem. Has anyone seen this (and a solution for it) ? Thanks. Martin ----------------------------------------------------------------- Martin Preen, Universitaet Freiburg, Institut fuer Informatik Georges-Koehler-Allee, Geb.52, Zi.00-006, 79110 Freiburg, Germany phone: ++49 761 203-8250 preen at informatik.uni-freiburg.de fax: ++49 761 203-8242 www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de
> a few days ago I switched out UW-server installation to > dovecot 0.99.14 (Solaris 9). There were a few client issues, > but mostly the migration was ok. > > But I have still some questions/problems: > > +) dovecot-auth: ... PAM: pipe() failed: Too many open files > I increased the max. number of open files. Is this normal > behaviour, that more than 512 open files are needed ?Martin, we're dealing with the same problem right now. We are using dovecot 1.0 stable and we migrated last weekend. 32-bit processes in Solaris 9 have 256 filedescriptors avail- able. This seems a bit to small. Using this command to get the number of file descriptors used by dovecot: ls -1 /proc/`cat /var/run/dovecot/master.pid`/fd | wc In our enviroment this is currently around 390. You can limit the number of file descriptors per process in Solaris 9. After starting Dovecot, we issued the command: plimit -n 8192,8192 `cat /var/run/dovecot/master.pid` This gives Dovecot 8192 filedescriptors. HTH, Remy
Martin Preen wrote:> Hello, > a few days ago I switched out UW-server installation to > dovecot 0.99.14 (Solaris 9). There were a few client issues, > but mostly the migration was ok.You know, if I had a dollar for every time I'd heard that :) Lots of people seem to be leaving UW-server for Dovecot. I, too, am running 0.99.14 on Solaris 9 (SPARC)... and loving it :)> But I have still some questions/problems: > > +) dovecot-auth: ... PAM: pipe() failed: Too many open files > I increased the max. number of open files. Is this normal > behaviour, that more than 512 open files are needed ?I've never seen this problem, but I am not using PAM. Even so, no, it doesn't sound normal. Are there any messages in the logs? How many auth tasks are you running?> +) we're using mbox on NFS and index files on local disks. > When building the index files for the first time, it takes > (of course) a long time for large folders. But we have these > users, and this will happen sometimes. Is there a way to > improve performance ?And still I ask myself "Why do people keep using mbox?" :) Timo has spoken of a specialised Dovecot LDA for the full 1.0 release. One of the features will be for it to update the indexes upon delivery. The only other option I can think of is to hack up a quick Python script to connect to an account, and select each of its folders. Hmm... perhaps I will.> One user currently gets this error from Pine when accessing a > large attachment: MAIL FOLDER "INBOX" CLOSED DUE TO ACCESS ERROR. > AFAIK this error is related to some timeout problem. > Has anyone seen this (and a solution for it) ?Is there anything in the Dovecot logs? -- Curtis Maloney
On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 11:39 +0100, Martin Preen wrote:> Hello, > a few days ago I switched out UW-server installation to > dovecot 0.99.14 (Solaris 9). There were a few client issues, > but mostly the migration was ok. > > But I have still some questions/problems: > > +) dovecot-auth: ... PAM: pipe() failed: Too many open files > I increased the max. number of open files. Is this normal > behaviour, that more than 512 open files are needed ?Depends on how many logins/sec you have. It's normal if you have >400/s, but probably not otherwise..> +) we're using mbox on NFS and index files on local disks. > When building the index files for the first time, it takes > (of course) a long time for large folders. But we have these > users, and this will happen sometimes. Is there a way to > improve performance ?1.0-tests / dovecot-stable releases take somewhat less time to do it.> +) in general dovecot saves a lot of NFS-bandwidth compared > to UW-imap. Thats what I was looking for. But there also seems > to be a problem with large inboxes (> 10 MB) and/or large > attachments. Is this right ? > > One user currently gets this error from Pine when accessing a > large attachment: MAIL FOLDER "INBOX" CLOSED DUE TO ACCESS ERROR. > AFAIK this error is related to some timeout problem. > Has anyone seen this (and a solution for it) ?Hmm. No idea really.. But I'd rather not spend time trying to figure out 0.99.x bugs. If this is reproduceable with 1.0-tests / dovecot-stable I'll look at it. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part URL: <http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20050305/f6f4462b/attachment-0001.bin>
Timo Sirainen wrote:> On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 11:39 +0100, Martin Preen wrote: > >>+) in general dovecot saves a lot of NFS-bandwidth compared >>to UW-imap. Thats what I was looking for. But there also seems >>to be a problem with large inboxes (> 10 MB) and/or large >>attachments. Is this right ? >> >>One user currently gets this error from Pine when accessing a >>large attachment: MAIL FOLDER "INBOX" CLOSED DUE TO ACCESS ERROR. >>AFAIK this error is related to some timeout problem. >>Has anyone seen this (and a solution for it) ? > > > Hmm. No idea really.. But I'd rather not spend time trying to figure out > 0.99.x bugs. If this is reproduceable with 1.0-tests / dovecot-stable > I'll look at it.I've seen this in 1.0-test, but I've only seen it when Pine is accessing a mailbox, then an IMAP session with Dovecot as the server is opened. So...I guess the answer is simple, don't access the mbox via imap while using Pine. ;-) Frank
Timo Sirainen wrote:> > On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 11:39 +0100, Martin Preen wrote: > > Hello, > > a few days ago I switched out UW-server installation to > > dovecot 0.99.14 (Solaris 9). There were a few client issues, > > but mostly the migration was ok. > > > > But I have still some questions/problems: > > > > +) dovecot-auth: ... PAM: pipe() failed: Too many open files > > I increased the max. number of open files. Is this normal > > behaviour, that more than 512 open files are needed ? > > Depends on how many logins/sec you have. It's normal if you have >400/s, > but probably not otherwise..It's less than 400 login/s. I found that there were an increasing number of login processes (about 500 extra processes per day). In the web archive there is a similar posting (but no answer): http://dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2005-February/006238.html I tried to fix it using the login parameters. Currently we use login_process_per_connection=no which gives much less extra processes (approx. 100 per day). Martin ----------------------------------------------------------------- Martin Preen, Universitaet Freiburg, Institut fuer Informatik Georges-Koehler-Allee, Geb.52, Zi.00-006, 79110 Freiburg, Germany phone: ++49 761 203-8250 preen at informatik.uni-freiburg.de fax: ++49 761 203-8242 www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de