[Dovecot] Problem with dovecot and system crashing

[Curtis Maloney]

Colin Kingsbury wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I am running dovecot on a linux server (FC3) in conjunction with
> Sendmail. My configuration is quite vanilla and I am having the
> following problem: occasionally (once every 3-10 days) the dovecot
> server will become unresponsive and attempting to access mail via pop3
> will produce an error message on the client side.

Any chance you could mention which version of Dovecot?

> As best as I can tell, the dovecot process dies because if I restart
> it with /sbin/service dovecot restart I get [failed] on the stop and
> [ok] on the start.

Does it show up in 'ps aux'?  Can you see dovecot, dovecot-auti, imap-login or 
pop3-login in the list?

> Now, here's the interesting part: within 5 minutes of this happening,
> the whole machine becomes completely unresponsive and requires a
> power-cycle to restart it. In between dovecot dying and the server
> going down, the other applications (apache, mysql) continue to run.

My gut feeling is that Dovecot is dieing as a result of something much more 
serious on your system - perhaps a resource starvation like disk or RAM.

--
Curtis Maloney