How to fix: Warning: fd limit (ulimit -n) is lower than required under max. load

This happened on a recent cPanel server. Dovecot was showing this error message while restarting the service:

Starting Dovecot Imap: Warning: fd limit (ulimit -n) is lower than required under max. load

The fix was quick and easy. You just need to reconfigure dovecot and rise the file descriptor limits.

Edit dovecot configuration file:

nano -w /etc/sysconfig/dovecot

Add this at the end:

ulimit -n 4096

Output example on how it should look after edit:

[[email protected]:~]cat /etc/sysconfig/dovecot
# Here you can specify your dovecot command line options.
#
#OPTIONS=""
ulimit -n 4096

Restart dovecot and exim once again:

service dovecot restart
service exim restart

That should get rid of that warning message.

About the Author: Martin Keler

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *