Even though the system is configured to allow a large number of open files, and tools such as lsof tell me dovecot is within that limit; I am seeing errors like this pretty frequently.

dovecot: imap-login: inotify_init() failed: Too many open files

I'm running Fedora Core 5 (2.6.18-1.2257.fc5 SMP x86_64) with dovecot-1.0-1.rc15 built from the FC6 SRPM, but I was seeing the same thing with 1.0-0.beta8.3.fc5 (one of the reasons for the jump to the FC6 ver).

system default limit is very high, and we aren't approaching it

[root@mail 2496]# cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max 738223 [root@mail fs]# cat file-nr 8704 0 738223

the limit per user is 1024

[root@mail 2496]# su -c 'ulimit -n' dlbewley 1024

But dovecot doesn't appear to be above that.

it looks like the master process is well below that

[root@mail 2496]# lsof -p cat /var/run/dovecot/master.pid | wc -l 280

but overall, this user has way more than that

[root@mail fs]# lsof -nu dovecot |wc -l 3145

So, I raised the limit for dovecot to 5000 soft and 10000 hard to see if it would make a difference. Even after a reboot, the next day the errors returned.

Today login_process_per_connection is set to 'no' rather than the default to see if it makes a difference. So far today, no errors.

Config looks like this: protocols = imap imaps pop3 pop3s ssl_cert_file = /usr/share/ssl/certs/mail.cert ssl_key_file = /usr/share/ssl/private/mail.key disable_plaintext_auth = no login_process_per_connection = no max_mail_processes = 2048 protocol imap { } protocol pop3 { } auth_username_chars = auth_master_user_separator = * auth default { mechanisms = plain passdb passwd-file { args = /etc/dovecot/dovecot.masterusers master = yes pass = no } passdb pam { } userdb passwd { } user = root } plugin { }

Dale Bewley - Unix Administrator - Shields Library - UC Davis GPG: 0xB098A0F3 0D5A 9AEB 43F4 F84C 7EFD 1753 064D 2583 B098 A0F3