On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, Bill Boebel wrote:

Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 17:47:55 -0400 (EDT) From: Bill Boebel <bill@webmail.us> To: dovecot@dovecot.org Subject: Re: [Dovecot] 1.0rc8 status report

On Wed, October 11, 2006 11:26 am, Timo Sirainen <tss@iki.fi> said:

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On Wed, 2006-10-11 at 15:54 +0100, David Lee wrote:

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It basically went well. But just over two hours hours later I had to back off, because of a significant dovecot problem, namely that dovecot crashed, almost silently. The only traces of this event in the log file seem to be: Oct 10 16:26:12 [...] dovecot: child 24525 (login) returned error 89 Oct 10 16:26:14 [...] dovecot: Login process died too early - shutting down

Looks like this is happening to some people now.. Unfortunately I can't really do anything with this little information.

I was seeing this too, with the CVS version just before RC8. I believe that when login_max_processes_count is reached (the default is 128) Dovecot is crashing rather than handling that condition semi gracefully.

The reason I think this is because we have a cluster of servers that do search indexing for our IMAP mailboxes, and due to a bug this week, those servers started slamming one of our IMAP servers with rapid login failures. Dovecot crashed frequently with "Login process died too early - shutting down" while this was occurring. And then also under normal operation we were seeing Dovecot crash about once per day on random servers when that server was under a heavy IMAP load.

To work around this we switched to "login_process_per_connection = no" and bumped up our file descritor limit ("ulimit -n"). No crashes since. But probably still needs to be fixed in the code.

I had the same issue in rc7, same fix solved it, I agree that the "login process died too early" message needs to be fixed in the code. Totally misleading message; it would be nice if the code did something more rational than just dying. I'm running rc8 in this fashion with no problems.

Jeff Earickson Colby College