Re: [gentoo-user] dovecot + inotify max_user instances

[Alan McKinnon]

On 06/01/2014 20:50, Tanstaafl wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Last year Timo (the dovecot author) remoted into our server and migrated
> us from courier-imap to dovecot. One of the things we ran into
> afterwards was this warning in the logs:
>
>> Warning: Inotify instance limit for user 200 (UID vmail) exceeded,
>> disabling. Increase /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_instances
>
> He solved it by doing:
>
> echo 1024 > /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_instances
>
> Then he said he was going to solve this permanently by changing the init
> script...
>
> Well, my shiny new server encountered the same issue once it went under
> load this morning, so I had to dig out this solution - but obviously
> this will come back again the next time I reboot, so I want to find a
> permanent solution.
>
> I guess I could manually modify my init script, but I'm clueless as to
> where or how.
>
> If someone can help me figure out how to do this, I'll go open a bug to
> get this added to the gentoo init script permanently.

[snip]

There's a more generic solution that doesn't involve hacking the init
script. Not all dovecot users will appreciate such a change be put on
their systems and that kind of config is best left up to the individual
sysadmin to determine what suits them best (no single value satisfies
everyone).

Instead, add that echo statement to a file in /etc/local.d/ and add the
local service to your default runlevel. It will tweak the
max_user_instances knob for you when it runs, same with all such local
knob fiddling you do to optimize performance.

I think overall this is better than hacking around in dovecot's start-up
script (a rather unsuitable place for it imho)



-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com