BUG? File descriptor use in cmd_append (for MULTIAPPEND) results in many open files

[Andrew Morgan]

On Mon, 11 Dec 2006, Nik Conwell wrote:

> On Dec 11, 2006, at 12:29 PM, Andrew Morgan wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 11 Dec 2006, Nik Conwell wrote:
>> 
>>> I'm using the UW mailutil to transfer mailboxes from UW to Cyrus (2.3.7). 
>>> It uses APPEND, specifically multiappend (single APPEND with multiple 
>>> messages being appended).  Cyrus-imapd handles this multiappend by 
>>> creating stage files for each appended message and leaving the file 
>>> descriptor open.  The problem is that after 240 messages, we run out of 
>>> file descriptors and so an open() of the next stage file fails with 
>>> EMFILE.  I updated /etc/cyrus.conf to make the max fds be 1024 (AFAICT 
>>> kernel MAX) which helped somewhat but not for larger mailboxes with > 1008 
>>> messages.
>>> 
>>> Shouldn't the multiappend/append be closing the FD for each stage file and 
>>> then reopening it later as it needs it?
>>> 
>>> Do people just tweak their kernels to have some insane number of FDs 
>>> available in order to compensate for this?
>>> 
>>> Or, do people not use mailutil and instead use something that issues 
>>> multiple append commands rather than a single append with multiple 
>>> e-mails?
>> 
>> We run with a much, much larger number of file descriptors here.  I've 
>> increased the system limit to around 200k (/proc/sys/fs/file-max on linux). 
>> This is for the day-to-day running of Cyrus, so I don't know if you would 
>> need a higher limit for running mailutil (but I doubt it).
>> 
>> In practice, each of my backends has only used a maximum of around 12k file 
>> descriptors, but I'd hate to run out!  :)
>
> That's for the entire system though, right?  I'm running into a 1024 limit 
> per process, namely the cyrus imap server process has all the appended stage 
> files open.  Am I missing something fundamental here?  (I probably am because 
> I would have figured people would have run into this issue already...)
>
> BTW - my /proc/sys/fs/file-max has 406572.

Ah, then you just need to up the ulimits in your cyrus init script. 
Something like:

# Crank up the limits
ulimit -n 209702
ulimit -u 2048
ulimit -c 102400


 	Andy