[Dovecot] Problem with dovecot and system crashing

[Colin Kingsbury]

On 8/8/05, Curtis Maloney <cmaloney at cardgate.net> wrote:
> 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?

0.99.13 IIRC.

> > 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.

Disk space is only 10% full and I'd think 1GB of RAM should be enough,
but perhaps I'm wrong? This machine isn't bearing that heavy a burden.
I also suspected something other than dovecot was causing this but
there are no smoking guns.

Thanks,
-cwk.