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
On 7.4.2007, at 6.31, Timothy Martin wrote:
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
Hmm. This should probably be changed so that it won't even try
unstalling that fast..
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".
imap or imap-login? You can limit the max. number of imap processes
from max_mail_processes setting and imap-login processes from
login_max_processes_count. So by default it'll create max. 1024+128
processes. If this is too much for your server then you can drop them
to some more reasonable limits..
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.
I guess the only way would be to find out how many imap processes
really were running at that time, but there's no really easy way to
do that. You'd have to be looking at the login/logout lines and
figure it out based on them..
participants (2)
-
Timo Sirainen
-
Timothy Martin