On 8/8/05, Curtis Maloney <cmaloney@cardgate.net> wrote:

Colin Kingsbury wrote:

...

Hi all,

I am running dovecot on a linux server (FC3) in conjunction with Sendmail. My configuration is quite vanilla and I am having the following problem: occasionally (once every 3-10 days) the dovecot server will become unresponsive and attempting to access mail via pop3 will produce an error message on the client side.

Any chance you could mention which version of Dovecot?

0.99.13 IIRC.

...

Now, here's the interesting part: within 5 minutes of this happening, the whole machine becomes completely unresponsive and requires a power-cycle to restart it. In between dovecot dying and the server going down, the other applications (apache, mysql) continue to run.

My gut feeling is that Dovecot is dieing as a result of something much more serious on your system - perhaps a resource starvation like disk or RAM.

Disk space is only 10% full and I'd think 1GB of RAM should be enough, but perhaps I'm wrong? This machine isn't bearing that heavy a burden. I also suspected something other than dovecot was causing this but there are no smoking guns.

Thanks, -cwk.

On Fri, 2005-08-12 at 09:00 -0400, Colin Kingsbury wrote:

On 8/8/05, Curtis Maloney

...

Colin Kingsbury wrote:

...

Hi all,

I am running dovecot on a linux server (FC3) in conjunction with Sendmail. My configuration is quite vanilla and I am having the following problem: occasionally (once every 3-10 days) the dovecot server will become unresponsive and attempting to access mail via pop3 will produce an error message on the client side.

Any chance you could mention which version of Dovecot?

...

As best as I can tell, the dovecot process dies because if I restart it with /sbin/service dovecot restart I get [failed] on the stop and [ok] on the start.

Does it show up in 'ps aux'? Can you see dovecot, dovecot-auti, imap-login or pop3-login in the list?

It happened again today. Nothing showed up in the list. Also got a kernel panic on restart. Any suggestions on this would be greatly appreciated.

This all sounds like your hardware is breaking/overheating. Only way Dovecot can hang your system completely is by creating tons of processes, and if it's not doing that the system itself is somehow broken. Kernel panic on restart also suggests that..