dovecot - Jan 2012 - imap-login process_limit reached

I've been having some problems with IMAP user connections to the Dovecot 
(v2.0.8) server.  The following message is being logged.

    Jan 16 10:51:36 postal dovecot: master: Warning:
    service(imap-login): process_limit reached, client connections are
    being dropped

The server is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 4 (update 6).
Dovecot is v2.0.8.

We have only 29 user accounts in /etc/dovecot/users.  There were 196 
"dovecot/imap" processes and 6 other dovecot processes, for a total of
202 "dovecot" processes, listed in the 'ps aux' output when
problems
were being experienced.

Stopping and restarting the Dovecot system fixes the problem -- for a while.

The 'doveconf -n' output is attached.  I have not set any 
"process_limit" values, and I don't think I'm getting anywhere
close to
the 1024 default, so I'm pretty confused as to what might be wrong.

Any suggestions on what to do next are appreciated.

Thanks,
- Don

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First of all, feature request:

  doveconf -d
    show the default value of all settings


On 01/16/12 17:41, Don Buchholz wrote:
> 
> The 'doveconf -n' output is attached.  I have not set any
> "process_limit" values, and I don't think I'm getting
anywhere close to
> the 1024 default, so I'm pretty confused as to what might be wrong.
> 
> Any suggestions on what to do next are appreciated.

What makes you think 1024 is the default? We had to increase it. It
shows up in doveconf -n output, so I don't think that's the default.

# doveconf -n | grep limit
default_process_limit = 1024

On Mon, 2012-01-16 at 14:41 -0800, Don Buchholz wrote:
> I've been having some problems with IMAP user connections to the
Dovecot
> (v2.0.8) server.  The following message is being logged.
> 
>     Jan 16 10:51:36 postal dovecot: master: Warning:
>     service(imap-login): process_limit reached, client connections are
>     being dropped
Maybe this will help some in future:
http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-2.1/rev/a4e61c99c7eb

The new error message is:

service(imap-login): process_limit (100) reached, client connections are being
dropped

On 17.1.2012, at 16.23, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> First of all, feature request:
> 
>  doveconf -d
>    show the default value of all settings
Done: http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-2.1/rev/41cb0217b7c3