dovecot - Sep 2007 - Dovecot / OS X 10.4 Mail.app and "Too Many Opened files" error message ?

Hello,

I am trying to move from Courier-imap to dovecot....

Even if the processes to move logical (eg name spaces etc...) went  
very and without any problem, I've some etrange behavior when Imap  
client is Mac OS X Mail.app.

I've got a big mailbox that have about 3 / 4G of mail in several  
folder (lots !!!)...

After a long time, the OS X client say error : "Too Many opened
files".

I have check on the servers (a FreeBSD farm of 3 servers using  
freebsd ports of dovecot)...

And nothing special...

A question : why do I have never this kind of message on courier imap  
and why do I get this on dovecot... ?

Configuration file on demand... if needed...

THanks,
/Xavier
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(replying to myself)
> After a long time, the OS X client say error : "Too Many opened  
> files".
Seems that OS X has stupidly low number of files that can be opened...

$ ulimit -a
[...]
open files                    (-n) 256

On my MacBook Pro....

This is bloody low....

So I've figured to change this limit globaly, but it seems that OS X  
don't have any limits.conf or default values....

This kinda strange..

So I decided to do some local fixe for Mail.app  only :

in /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/
$ sudo mv Mail Mail.orig
and ...
Create a Mail file with this following content :
#!/bin/sh

# thanks to http://www.amug.org/~glguerin/howto/More-open-files.html

# To understand this, read 'man sh' below "substring
processing".
# This can also be accomplished with the 'dirname' command,
# but it may not be installed.
here="${0%/*}"

# This should be the name of your native Java-app's executable.
cmd='Mail.orig'

# Set all desired soft-limits here.  See 'ulimit' in 'man sh'.
ulimit -S -n 1000

# Execute the Java-app in the current process.  See 'exec' in 'man
sh'.
exec "$here/$cmd" "$@"

$ sudo chmod +x Mail

and this all...

FYI Mail.app is really strange thing....

$ lsof | grep Mail.orig | wc -l
150

Mostly all libraries and TCP connection to mail server...

Maybe this can be added to Wiki even if it is not too mutch dovecot  
related, but can be usefull for people like me that does have lots of  
mail....

/Xavier

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On Sep 14, 2007, at 20:48, Xavier Beaudouin wrote:
> (replying to myself)
>
>> After a long time, the OS X client say error : "Too Many opened  
>> files".
>
> Seems that OS X has stupidly low number of files that can be opened...
>
> $ ulimit -a
> [...]
> open files                    (-n) 256
>
> On my MacBook Pro....
>
> This is bloody low....
>
> So I've figured to change this limit globaly, but it seems that OS  
> X don't have any limits.conf or default values....
>
Use launchctl for this under 10.4. Edit /etc/launchd.conf or create  
it if it does not exist and enter

limit maxfiles 512 1024

The first number is the soft limit the second one the hard limit.  
Reboot the computer and the limits are changed systemwide