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Pop close?!

In My email server (RH6.1), when many people access the mail server, the pop will be closed. In message log, "pop-3/tcp server failing (looping), service
 terminated "
why?
And Can  I Limit no of user access the mail server at the same time?
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perec

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mnewnham

The kernel sounds like it is running out of resources.

Try increasing the following parameters in the kernel

inodes, files, processes, flocks.

Some of these may be settable at run-time - see the Kernel-HOWTO.
How to tune the pararmter?
ANy suggestion?
What parameters? Read the docs in /usr/src/kernel/Documentation
An alternative is to simply run the pop-3 app in daemon mode, outside of inetd.
The problem is in your inetd.conf file.
You are spawning too many connections for it.  The default is 40 spawned programs in 60 seconds.  You can up this time though...
Your pop3 session probably looks like this:
pop3 stream tcp nowait root /path/pop3d

After the 'nowait' add '.XXX'  where XXX is the maximum number of serverinstances that may be spawned from inetd within an interval of 60 sec­s.

So now it should look like this:
pop3 stream tcp nowait.100 root /path/pop3d

I ran into this problem a few weeks ago.  Read the inetd.conf man pages for more info.

Derek