[Dovecot] Alerts when process limits are met

[Timo Sirainen]

On 1.9.2012, at 11.10, David Anderson wrote:

> I've not found the answer to this question anywhere - please forgive me if I overlooked.
> 
> I'd like to be able to be automatically alerted if process limits are hit (e.g. max POP3 logins).
> 
> Is there a way that I can configure a script to be run, in the same way that I can with quota warnings?
> 
> I can of course use logwatch, but this alerts me the next day, and logwatch can be noisy and it's easy to overlook.

Log errors/warnings to a separate file and watch it. Dovecot's error/warning log typically stays completely empty (except when stopping Dovecot). Anything you find there is a potential error..

> My motivation: for some reason my POP3 listener was hanging, and I had to restart dovecot (this is 2.0.9). But I was not aware - the process was still there, it was accepting connections (but not doing anything useful with them) and was actually managing to log the fact that the process limit was being hit (as more and more connections came in). If I could have been alerted I could have restarted dovecot earlier.

Restarting is kind of a kludgy solution, since the only thing it does is to kill all the existing connections and hope that they don't immediately just reconnect back. An equivalent fix is doveadm kick '*'