[Dovecot] fork bomb?

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 20:31:59 -0700

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























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