I'm running dovecot on my FreeBSD 6.0 VPS (just upgraded from FBSD
4.x) and today my server completely ran out of resources and the
logs for all my services had errors like this one from dovecot:
Apr 6 19:32:22 design1st dovecot: fork() failed: Resource temporarily unavailable
eventually it got worse:
Apr 6 21:19:34 design1st dovecot: fork() failed: Resource
temporarily unavailable
Apr 6 21:19:34 design1st dovecot: Temporary failure in creating
login processes, slowing down for now
Apr 6 21:19:34 design1st dovecot: Created login processes
successfully, unstalling
Apr 6 21:19:35 design1st dovecot: fork() failed: Resource
temporarily unavailable
Apr 6 21:19:35 design1st dovecot: Temporary failure in creating
login processes, slowing down for now
Apr 6 21:20:36 design1st dovecot: fork() failed: Resource
temporarily unavailable
Apr 6 21:21:36 design1st dovecot: fork() failed: Resource
temporarily unavailable
Eventually the entire server became unresponsive. Normally I wouldn't
even think of blaming dovecot, but the hosting tech support said that
when the checked out "top" there were crazy amounts of imap processes
(maybe they just aren't used to dovecot's methods of dealing with
logins etc) but they blamed "my imap server".
Any way I can find out if it's really dovecot that's causing this? I
recognize it might not be a dovecot issue, but it's the only hint
i've got right now.
.tim