Too many open files

[Rob McMahon]

Cyrus-2.2.13 (yes, I know it's getting on a bit).  Solaris 10 SPARC, 
around 115,000 mailboxes.

I was mopping up a few users today with a script which basically does:

while (<>) {
  chomp;
  my $mb = 'user.' . $_;
  $client->setacl($mb, $user => 'c');
  $client->delete($mb);
}

After deleting just a few, I start getting errors like "Must login 
first", "System I/O Error" (sorry, I haven't got the exact messages to 
cut & paste).  Looking in the logs I see:

Aug 24 16:20:44 narcissus imap[24338]: [ID 240394 local6.error] IOERROR: 
opening quota file /var/imap/quota/V/user.??????.Trash: Too many open files
Aug 24 16:21:38 narcissus imap[24338]: [ID 816447 local6.error] warning: 
cannot open /etc/hosts.deny: Too many open files

and indeed this process has hit the default 256 limit, most of which 
seem to be quota files.  Other issues were manifesting, IMAP commands 
never completing for instance, so I had to kill this process, which in 
turn caused the master process to restart.  Not good.

Any suggestions on this ?  I could up maxfds to, say, 1024 for imap, but 
then would it just hit that limit instead.  No other IMAP process seems 
to use more than around 16 descriptors.

Cheers,

Rob

-- 
E-Mail:	Rob.McMahon at warwick.ac.uk		PHONE:  +44 24 7652 3037
Rob McMahon, IT Services, Warwick University, Coventry, CV4 7AL, England