Dovecot Error

R

roarkh

Verified User
Joined
Aug 30, 2005
Messages
141
Location
Bellingham, WA
I have been hearing some reports from my users that occasionally they are unable to log in to their webmail using roundcube or that sometimes when they are logged in they get kicked back out to the login screen with a message about an invalid session or something similar, I did some digging through my dovecot logs and am seeing this message now and again...

Code: 
Jun  7 09:32:42 ns1 dovecot[2684]: dovecot: pipe() failed: Too many open filesLogged out bytes=304/2105
Jun  7 09:32:42 ns1 dovecot[2684]: dovecot: pipe() failed: Too many open filesJun  7 09:32:42 ns1 dovecot[2684]: dovecot: Created login processes successfully
, unstallingJun  7 09:32:43 ns1 dovecot[2684]: dovecot: pipe() failed: Too many open files
Jun  7 09:32:43 ns1 dovecot[2684]: dovecot: Temporary failure in creating login processes, slowing down for now

I wondering if anyone here knows what might be causing this and what I might be able to try to fix it.

Thanks in advance.

Roark Holz
 
I think I have made some headway on this, I added the following line to my dovecot.conf file and restarted dovecot...
Code: 
login_max_processes_count = 512
Doing so displayed this message...
Code: 
Shutting down dovecot:                                     [  OK  ]
Starting dovecot: Warning: fd limit 1024 is lower than what Dovecot can use under full load (more than 1536). Either grow the limit or change login_max_processes_count and max_mail_processes settings
Dovecot is running fine now but I do want to determine how to set the fd limit for user dovecot to 1536 instead of 1024. I think this may be accomplished by adding a line to /etc/security/limits.conf or by issuing a "ulimit -Hn 1536" run after doing an "su - dovecot" but I am not entirely sure about that yet. If someone here had experience in upping the "fd limit" for the user Dovecot I would appreciate any input.
 
Solved I think

It occurred to me that Apache would probably need more than a limit of 1024 files as well so that got me thinking, after some hunting I found that the beginning of the httpd script in /etc/init.d was the following line...
Code: 
ulimit -HSn 32768
So, I decided to try the same trick in the dovecot startup script and added the following line after the first set of comments and restarted dovecot...
Code: 
ulimit -HSn 1536
This time dovecot restarted without the warning message so I believe this problem is solved. Hopefully this will help someone else down the road.

Roark Holz
 
I was just using the Apache startup script setting as an example for formatting my command, the default setting for CentOS is 1024 so what I am doing is increasing the setting for Dovecot from 1024 to 1536 which (according to the warning message you can read in my original post) is what Dovecot needs minimally to handle 512 simultaneous logins. Hopefully that makes sense. Since the warning message did not occur again after making the change I think this solved my problem.

Thank you.

Roark Holz
 
Old topic, but right after updating Dovecot from 2.2.23 to 2.2.24, I got a similar error;
Code: 
fd limit (ulimit -n) is lower than required under max. load (1024 < 12288), because of default_client_limit
 
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