[Dovecot] child (login) killed with signal 9

[Bill Cole]

At 1:13 PM -0500 12/16/07, Matt LaPlante wrote:
>Anyone?  Bueller?

Chances are that no one else is seeing this...

>On Dec 12, 2007 9:19 PM, Matt LaPlante <cyberdog3k at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  Hi,
>>   I'm running dovecot on an Ubuntu server (1:1.0.5-1ubuntu2).  Dovecot
>>  provides pop3, imap, and sasl to postfix.  The setup works quite
>>  nicely, however I do have one error that shows up repeatedly in my
>>  dovecot.log.
>>
>>  <snip>
>>  dovecot: 2007-12-12 09:29:06 Error: child 32765 (login) killed with signal 9
>>  dovecot: 2007-12-12 09:29:06 Error: child 18039 (login) killed with signal 9
>>  dovecot: 2007-12-12 10:05:07 Error: child 26088 (login) killed with signal 9
>>  dovecot: 2007-12-12 10:05:07 Error: child 5271 (login) killed with signal 9
>>  dovecot: 2007-12-12 10:05:07 Error: child 5273 (login) killed with signal 9
>>  <snip>
>>
>>  I'm not aware that this is actually causing problems, but since it
>>  shows up several hundred times a day on a couple-user setup, I'm
>>  rather curious about what's causing it.

It is rather odd. Signal 9 is "KILL" and that is a rather rude way to 
be knocking out dovecot login processes. It isn't a normal occurrence 
on the Dovecot machines I work with, and it seems unlikely that 
anything internal to Dovecot would be doing that sort of thing.

Since the 5 you show imply (weakly) that the slaughter is taking out 
login processes in simultaneous bunches a few seconds into a minute, 
I'd start looking at whether you have any sort of ill-considered 
system housekeeping running from cron.

-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com