[Dovecot] (imap) killed with signal 9 on Linux/OpenVZ VPS

[Adam Flott]

I'm trying to get dovecot running on my VPS and the main imap process is
receiving a SIGKILL from what I presume to be the Linux Kernel and/or
OpenVZ. This happens after I login and my client(s) just sit their idling. The
mailbox is empty.

I'm not running out of memory. stracing the process doesn't show anything
interesting...

...
gettimeofday({1233024777, 844804}, {420, 0}) = 0
gettimeofday({1233024777, 844912}, NULL) = 0
poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI|POLLERR|POLLHUP|POLLNVAL}, {fd=2,
events=POLLERR|POLLHUP|POLLNVAL}, {fd=0,
events=POLLIN|POLLPRI|POLLERR|POLLHUP|POLLNVAL}], 3, 10000) = -1 EINTR
(Interrupted system call)
+++ killed by SIGKILL +++

This is on a CentOS 5.2 VPS. I haven't changed much other than installing a
few packages. I've also had this exact same problem on Debian 4.0 VPS (OpenVZ)
under the same machine. Turning off SSL and logging in plain old IMAP didn't
change anything. Under the Debian installation I tried the latest version of
dovecot (1.1.8 or so), different I/O loop methods, turning them off, on, etc.

The only other reference via Google I can find to this sort of problem is:

http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2007-December/027440.html

But that was with the login process, whereas mine is with the imap daemon.


Any help is greatly appreciated.

Adam


# uname -a
Linux npjh.com 2.6.18-ovz028stab039.1-smp #1 SMP Tue Jul 24 12:12:48 MSD 2007
i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

# dovecot -n
# 1.0.7: /etc/dovecot.conf
log_path: /var/log/dovecot.log
info_log_path: /var/log/dovecot-info.log
protocols: imaps
ssl_cert_file: /etc/ssl/certs/mail.pem
ssl_key_file: /etc/ssl/private/mail.key
disable_plaintext_auth: yes
login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login
login_executable: /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
login_processes_count: 2
mail_location: maildir:~/Maildir
maildir_copy_with_hardlinks: yes
namespace:
   type: private
   separator: .
   prefix: INBOX.
   inbox: yes
auth default:
   mechanisms: digest-md5 cram-md5 login plain
   passdb:
     driver: passwd-file
     args: /etc/dovecot/passwd
   userdb:
     driver: static
     args: uid=vmail gid=vmail home=/home/vmail/%u
   socket:
     type: listen
     client:
       path: /var/run/dovecot/auth-client
       mode: 432
       user: postfix
       group: postfix


# free
              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        256000      75100     180900          0          0          0
-/+ buffers/cache:      75100     180900
Swap:            0          0          0