[Dovecot] Initial status notification not received

[Nicolas KOWALSKI]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 08:18:32AM +0200, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On 16.11.2012, at 16.12, Nicolas KOWALSKI wrote:
> 
> > We have SLES-11 SP2 Xen VMs running dovecot as IMAP proxies. At VMs 
> > startup, dovecot almost always shows these errors:
> > 
> > Nov 16 14:29:19 server dovecot: master: Dovecot v2.1.10 starting up (core dumps disabled)
> > Nov 16 14:29:55 server dovecot: master: Error: service(anvil): Initial status notification not received in 30 seconds, killing the process
> > Nov 16 14:29:55 server dovecot: master: Error: service(log): Initial status notification not received in 30 seconds, killing the process
> > Nov 16 14:29:55 server dovecot: master: Error: service(ssl-params): Initial status notification not received in 30 seconds, killing the process
> > Nov 16 14:29:55 server dovecot: master: Error: service(log): child 3591 killed with signal 9
> > 
> > As the last line tells, dovecot stops logging information. We have to 
> > restart the dovecot processes to get back normal behaviour. I also tried 
> > to set idle_kill values to services definitions, without success.
> 
> You mean this happens when the VM starts up, but if you manually restart it later they don't happen?

Yes.

> > Is there a way to prevent these errors?
> 
> I wonder if it's because of SLES or something else.

We narrowed the problem to another process, started before dovecot, 
which takes a lot of CPU and disk resources; since we delayed its 
launch, dovecot starts up happily.

However, I am still confused about why dovecot kills itself. Maybe the 
master process could restart its runaway processes, or the initial 
status notification delay could be customized?

-- 
Nicolas