[Dovecot] Out of memory problem

[Timo Sirainen]

On Mon, 2006-02-06 at 11:29 +0200, Neil Wilson wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> Running SuSe 9.3 with dovecot 1.0.alpha3 source installation.
> 
> One of the users has quite a lot of important email in a folder, but 
> when he trys to view this folder, it either sits and waits, and then 
> times out, or just logs out straight away.

How many messages does the mailbox have?

> Feb  6 09:22:08 mail postfix/qmgr[27221]: 198B96D1CE: removed
> Feb  6 09:22:08 mail dovecot: imap(ralphs): pool_system_malloc(): Out of 
> memory
> Feb  6 09:22:08 mail dovecot: child 23018 (imap) returned error 83 (Out 
> of memory)

You could try increasing mail_process_size to larger than the default
256MB. Although that should have been enough for even mailboxes with
tens of thousands of messages..

One possibility would also be that the mailbox's index files are broken
and Dovecot tries to allocate too much memory, which fails. You could
try deleting them and reopening the mailbox. But please make a copy of
those files first and if deleting them helps, send them to me so I can
try to fix that bug permanently.

dovecot.index and dovecot.index.log files don't contain any sensitive
information, but dovecot.index.cache may contain message subjects,
from/to/etc. fields, so you might not want to send that without
overwriting that data (I could write a program to do that).