[Dovecot] Re: Dovecot memory use and settings

[Roger Weeks]

We're continuing to have dovecot auth-worker failures once or more  
times per day.  The symptoms are these in the log:

pop1 dovecot: auth-worker(default): Out of memory (Needed 8164 bytes)

or

auth-worker(default): sql(lewis1,12.43.59.134): Password query  
failed: MySQL client ran out of memory

Timo suggested that we need to up the
auth_process_size = 256

However, we've tried increasing this to 512 and then 768.  The  
comment on the entry says
# Set max. process size in megabytes.

These changes don't seem to make any difference.  On both of our  
servers (RH ES4, 1MB RAM), we never seem to have more than 300MB of  
RAM used.

However, the auth-worker process continues to fail occasionally.  It  
does respawn itself after a couple of minutes, but in that time all  
authentication for dovecot fails.

Am I missing something else in the config?

--
Roger J. Weeks
Systems & Network Administrator
Mendocino Community Network

On Jan 11, 2006, at 12:51 PM, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> On Wed, 2006-01-11 at 12:40 -0800, Roger Weeks wrote:
>> pop1 dovecot: auth-worker(default): Out of memory (Needed 8164 bytes)
>>
>> or
>>
>> auth-worker(default): sql(lewis1,12.43.59.134): Password query
>> failed: MySQL client ran out of memory
>
> These are different from the system running out of memory. It's about
> authentication process size hitting its configured limit. Default is:
>
> # Set max. process size in megabytes.
> #auth_process_size = 256
>
> So it appears that it's trying to grow above 256MB at which point it
> gets killed. This could mean that something is leaking memory, but I
> don't remember other people having this problem, so it might be  
> somehow
> specific to your configuration.
>
> In any case those auth-workers are restarted automatically whenever  
> they
> die so it shouldn't be that big of a problem?
>
> There are also ways to debug this if you want to..
>