[Dovecot] Apple Mail and too many open files?

[Jeff Turner]

Alan,

On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 07:42:34AM +0200, Alan Schmitt wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> For two days in a row, I've noticed that my dovecot server (hosted on  
> a PowerMac running OS X) has stopped working, with a bunch of error  
> messages in /var/log/mail.log like:
> May 24 07:31:10 top dovecot: pipe() failed: Too many open files

How many is a bunch?

Dovecot once died on me after an upgrade, because the logfile had filled
up the 7Gb partition with millions of these errors:

dovecot: Feb 27 03:55:46 Error: pipe() failed: Too many open files
dovecot: Feb 27 03:55:46 Error: pipe() failed: Too many open files
dovecot: Feb 27 03:55:46 Error: pipe() failed: Too many open files

In my case, the logs just preceding these were:

dovecot: Feb 27 03:17:56 Fatal: execv(/usr/local/libexec/dovecot/ssl-build-param) failed: No such file or directory
dovecot: Feb 27 03:17:56 Error: child 4422 (ssl-build-param) returned error 84 (exec() failed)
dovecot: Feb 27 03:27:56 Fatal: execv(/usr/local/libexec/dovecot/ssl-build-param) failed: No such file or directory
dovecot: Feb 27 03:27:57 Error: child 14606 (ssl-build-param) returned error 84 (exec() failed)
dovecot: Feb 27 03:37:57 Fatal: execv(/usr/local/libexec/dovecot/ssl-build-param) failed: No such file or directory
dovecot: Feb 27 03:37:57 Error: child 24932 (ssl-build-param) returned error 84 (exec() failed)
dovecot: Feb 27 03:47:58 Fatal: execv(/usr/local/libexec/dovecot/ssl-build-param) failed: No such file or directory
dovecot: Feb 27 03:47:58 Error: child 2728 (ssl-build-param) returned error 84 (exec() failed)
dovecot: Feb 27 03:55:46 Error: pipe() failed: Too many open files
dovecot: Feb 27 03:55:46 Error: pipe() failed: Too many open files
...

It turned out that I'd configured dovecot with './configure
--program-suffix=1.0b3'. The compile therefore built a
ssl-build-param-1.0b3 binary, but as you can see in the logs, still
expected a 'ssl-build-params' binary.  Symlinking one to the other solved
this.

HTH


--Jeff

> To solve this, I have to kill -9 dovecot and the (many) imap   
> processes running.
> 
> The only client accessing the server is a machine running Apple Mail.  
> I tried to increase the limit in the number of files (I did a  
> "launchctl limit maxfiles 1024 unlimited", but the problem still  
> happened.
> 
> Is this a known problem? Should I allow still more files?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Alan
> 
> -- 
> Alan Schmitt <http://alan.petitepomme.net/>
> 
> The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool  
> happen.
> .O.
> ..O
> OOO
> 
>