I started having problems over the weekend. I noticed that mail wasn’t being delivered and when I checked for mail, the app was just spinning. When I logged in to the admin console most of the services were not online. I restarted my droplet (DigitalOcean) and the services came back online.
Then it happened again on Tuesday, and I ran sudo mailinabox
and the services restarted. It happened again yesterday, and sudo mailinabox
restarted the services again.
This time, I had time to dig into the problem and noticed the logs were reporting a process limit had been reached for dovecot/imap-login
. I restarted dovecot with service dovecot restart
and was able to check mail again. But I already see logins stacking up:
root@mailbox:/var/log# ps -ef | grep login
root 917 1 0 May09 ? 00:00:00 /lib/systemd/systemd-logind
dovenull 26802 26760 0 08:32 ? 00:00:00 dovecot/imap-login
dovenull 26804 26760 0 08:32 ? 00:00:00 dovecot/imap-login
dovenull 26811 26760 0 08:32 ? 00:00:00 dovecot/imap-login
dovenull 26815 26760 0 08:32 ? 00:00:00 dovecot/imap-login
dovenull 26818 26760 0 08:32 ? 00:00:00 dovecot/imap-login
dovenull 26820 26760 0 08:33 ? 00:00:00 dovecot/imap-login
dovenull 26831 26760 0 08:33 ? 00:00:00 dovecot/imap-login
I’m running a basic DigitalOcean droplet with 1GB of memory and 25GB of disk. It’s not hitting any of those limits (though the resources are at about 80%, and I’m resizing the droplet now to the newer, more robust $10 version they came out with a few months back).
Any solution to this other than cronning up a reset of the dovecot service once an hour or something?