[Dovecot] Panic: Trying to allocate 2147483648 bytes

[David Halik]

Hi all,

I recently upgraded from courier to dovecot 1.1.12 on a Solaris 9 system 
with about 100 users. We have been testing dovecot for sometime in a 
mixed Linux/Solaris environment and are aware of the index endianess 
issue with multiple archs. To solve this, we run with INDEX=MEMORY (as 
seen in the docs) so that only Linux clients have anything to do with 
the indexes. We generally have much more of them anyways. So far 
everything is working smoothly, but when someone does a search through 
directory with a large number of emails, dovecot dies and prints the 
following message:

[ID 107833 mail.crit] Panic: Trying to allocate 2147483648 bytes

I googled around and saw this same issue elsewhere, with NFS indexes 
usually being the problem. However, we have indexes turned off, so I 
don't understand why the same problem is still happening.

Just to be sure, I ran with:

mmap_disable = yes
dotlock_use_excl = no
mail_nfs_storage = yes

But there has been no change, I can still reproduce it at will.

Setting mail_nfs_index = yes caused my connections to stop working, so 
that didn't help either. Besides, I wouldn't think that would be the 
answer considering we set INDEX=MEMORY.

This thread also seems to be related, but we're definitely running with 
this code in 1.1.12, yet it still happens:

http://dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2008-September/033615.html

I grabbed a backtrace if it is helpful:

http://pastebin.com/f5f3d282c

Also, here is dovecot -n:

# 1.1.12: /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf
# OS: SunOS 5.9 sun4u 
protocols: imap imaps pop3 pop3s
ssl_cert_file: /usr/local/ssl/certs/nbcs.key+crt.pem
ssl_key_file: /usr/local/ssl/certs/nbcs.key+crt.pem
login_dir: /usr/local/var/run/dovecot/login
login_executable(default): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
login_executable(imap): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
login_executable(pop3): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/pop3-login
login_greeting_capability(default): yes
login_greeting_capability(imap): yes
login_greeting_capability(pop3): no
mail_location: maildir:~/Maildir:INDEX=MEMORY
mmap_disable: yes
mail_nfs_storage: yes
mail_executable(default): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap
mail_executable(imap): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap
mail_executable(pop3): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/pop3
mail_plugins(default): quota imap_quota
mail_plugins(imap): quota imap_quota
mail_plugins(pop3): quota pop3_quota
mail_plugin_dir(default): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/imap
mail_plugin_dir(imap): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/imap
mail_plugin_dir(pop3): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/pop3
pop3_uidl_format(default): %08Xu%08Xv
pop3_uidl_format(imap): %08Xu%08Xv
pop3_uidl_format(pop3): UID%u-%v
namespace:
  type: private
  separator: .
  prefix: INBOX.
  inbox: yes
  list: yes
  subscriptions: yes
auth default:
  passdb:
    driver: pam
    args: *
  userdb:
    driver: passwd
plugin:
  quota: fs


Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,
-Dave

-- 
================================
David Halik
System Administrator
OIT-CSS Rutgers University
dhalik at jla.rutgers.edu
================================