[Dovecot] Problem with dovecot and system crashing

[Colin Kingsbury]

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.

> > 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.

No lack of RAM or disk space. Someone earlier in the week suggested
something about file handles but didn't have much more to say about
it.