Dovecot does not start on MacOS Monterey

Doro Rose doroerose at gmail.com
Sun Oct 30 13:24:51 UTC 2022


Thanks for the explanation. In the other thread it was mentioned that the only setting that works with this problem is setting default_vsz_limit to 0 which sounds like the lowest limit possible.

Von meinem iPhone gesendet

> Am 28.10.2022 um 18:28 schrieb Shawn Heisey <elyograg at elyograg.org>:
> 
> On 10/26/22 04:27, Doro Rose wrote:
>> Thanks for the quick response!
>> No. If I set default_vsz_limit to 0 it works. My understanding was that this shouldn't be necessary in the first place, shouldn't it?
> 
> Most systems and software do not limit the virtual memory size. This is because virtual memory is just address space until something actually uses it, and the OS can ensure that an application that is working correctly with regard to virtual memory will NOT allocate too much real memory because of virtual memory.
> 
> Dovecot is actually the only software I have seen that has a native config for limiting the virtual memory size.  I know why it's done ... there are certain classes of bug that can result in virtual memory leakage.  Because virtual memory is NOT real memory, this class of bug might go unnoticed if there is no limit.  Putting a limit on the size makes sure that bugs of that nature ARE caught.
> 
> My dovecot install is not huge ... only 200K total email messages stored.  But I had to increase the default_vsz_limit to get dovecot working.  I think it defaults to 256M, I increased it to 1024M.  Dovecot's log should tell you how much virtual memory Dovecot is requesting, if the request fails.
> 
> Thanks,
> Shawn
> 


More information about the dovecot mailing list