Hello, today our dovecot imap server died. The following message appeared in the logfile: dovecot: Mar 23 07:00:58 Error: pipe() failed: Too many open files We have one dovecot instance for pop3 and one for imap, so while the pop3-service was still available, the imap-service was not running any more. I've seen a lots of users keeping there imap-connections idle for hours, often more than one per mailbox. How can I limit this? Can I limit the maximum time a connection can be open? Regards Marten
you may want to try increasing the number of files available for the system. (Assuming your on linux). You'll have to google for the exact location but they should be something like file-max or inode-max under /proc On Suse... # find /proc/sys | grep file /proc/sys/fs/file-max /proc/sys/fs/file-nr # cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max 50716 Marten Lehmann wrote:> Hello, > > today our dovecot imap server died. The following message appeared in > the logfile: > > dovecot: Mar 23 07:00:58 Error: pipe() failed: Too many open files > > We have one dovecot instance for pop3 and one for imap, so while the > pop3-service was still available, the imap-service was not running any > more. > > I've seen a lots of users keeping there imap-connections idle for hours, > often more than one per mailbox. How can I limit this? Can I limit the > maximum time a connection can be open? > > Regards > Marten >
Marten Lehmann <lehmann <at> cnm.de> writes:> > Hello, > > today our dovecot imap server died. The following message appeared in > the logfile: > > dovecot: Mar 23 07:00:58 Error: pipe() failed: Too many open files > > We have one dovecot instance for pop3 and one for imap, so while the > pop3-service was still available, the imap-service was not running any more. > > I've seen a lots of users keeping there imap-connections idle for hours, > often more than one per mailbox. How can I limit this? Can I limit the > maximum time a connection can be open? > > Regards > Marten > >You could look at inreasing the file limits, on debian its in /etc/security/limits.conf, increase the default 'nofile' from 1024 to say, 20000 or something. No idea what it is in other distros, running 'ulimit -n 20000' before starting dovecot (as root) may help too. Cheers, Trent
Hi Still running 1.0 stable (an old release i know but until i see more stable reports on beta7 i will hold out). last night is the first time in months the dovecot has died. maillog has repeated lines of this. Apr 16 02:31:37 proteus2 dovecot: pipe() failed: Too many open files dovecot.log just shows last login Apr 16 02:31:36 Info: pop3-login: Login: username [IP] i restarted it Apr 16 08:38:04 Info: Dovecot v1.0-stable starting up and now it seems ok. anyone got a monitor script for watching the dovecot daemon and send a start if it dies? Mark