[Dovecot] memory allocation issues

[Timo Sirainen]

On 26.11.2012, at 22.03, Kelsey Cummings wrote:

>>> auth: Error: malloc: 58012: Cannot allocate memory
>>> auth: Error: Unable to allocate memory for mutexes from the region
>>> auth: Error: PANIC: Cannot allocate memory
>>> auth: passwd(test,1.1.1.1,<8HTlNHzNIQBAjhKC>): unknown user
..
>> Memory leak maybe? service auth { vsz_limit } anyway was reached (default 256 MB).
> 
> It is currently set to 768M, I'll go ahead and raise it up to 1G.
> Anything I can do to help see if it is a memory leak?

Is it really the auth master process that fails? 

> passdb {
>  args = imap
>  driver = pam
> }
..
> userdb {
>  driver = passwd
> }

Both of these lookups should be done by auth-worker processes. So why is it the auth process that complains?

Anyway .. if the problem really is auth-worker and this is only a logging problem (I would have expected auth-worker: prefix in log lines), then the solution is simple. Just restart the auth-worker processes every 1000 lookups:

service auth-worker {
  service_count = 1000
}