[Dovecot] child (login) killed with signal 9

[Matt LaPlante]

On Dec 16, 2007 3:15 PM, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
> On 13.12.2007, at 4.19, Matt LaPlante wrote:
>
> > dovecot: 2007-12-12 09:29:06 Error: child 32765 (login) killed with
> > signal 9
>
> Well, your message inspired me to waste some time and money on
> creating a new wiki: http://www.unixcoding.org/ and add a page there:
> http://www.unixcoding.org/Signals:
> SIGKILL
>
> Number: 9
>
> Killed by kernel, for example Linux's Out of Memory killer. dmesg may
> show the reason.

I'm familiar with sigkill. :)  The mystery to me is who is sending the
signals...

There is no evidence of anything in dmesg or syslog.  free reports
consistent amounts of space available, and none of my other daemons
seem to be subject to any ill effects.  Client connection rates are
very minimal and consistent.  To answer Bill, there are no cron jobs
on the system doing any sort of babysitting that would be killing
processes.

Being openvz, I suppose there is room for shenanigans to be occurring
in the background, but it doesn't really explain why only dovecot
seems to be affected.  (Unless it's a matter of perception, and only
dovecot is logging such things).

>
> Does setting login_process_size=64 fix this? If so, I'll update that
> text to mention setrlimit() address space limit.

This is currently 32 (according to dovecot.conf).  Wouldn't raising it
to 64 exacerbate memory problems if they do indeed exist?

>
>