How about you try moving the mail into another folder on daily basis, this way the INBOX would stay nice and empty.
doveadm move -u arch...@company.com Archive MAILBOX INBOX SENTBEFORE todays-date Aki On 16.02.2018 06:19, Terence Lau wrote: > > Bump. > > > > Any advice would be most appreciated. > > > > Thanks. > > > > *From:*Terence Lau > *Sent:* Wednesday, 24 January 2018 9:59 AM > *To:* 'dovecot@dovecot.org' <dovecot@dovecot.org> > *Subject:* Out of memory on lmtp vsz_limit > > > > Hi, > > > > We’ve been getting these types or errors for quite a while now … > > > > Fatal: master: service(lmtp): child 63477 returned error 83 (Out of > memory (service lmtp { vsz_limit=4096 MB }, you may need to increase it) > > > > … and these errors have been decreasing in occurrence as we increased > the default_vsz_limit. Which is good but I would like to get some > advice on how I could possibly eliminate the errors. > > > > We have an internal smtp server (postfix 3.1.0) that has the config > “always_bcc=arch...@company.com > <mailto:always_bcc=arch...@company.com>” over lmtp. This mailbox is > on a separate dovecot server with the following config (please let me > know if the full config is required): > > > > # 2.2.22 (fe789d2): /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf > > # Pigeonhole version 0.4.13 (7b14904) > > # OS: Linux 4.4.0-109-generic x86_64 Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS ext4 > > default_vsz_limit = 4 G > > mail_location = maildir:/home/vmail/%d/%n > > protocols = " imap lmtp pop3" > > service lmtp { > > inet_listener lmtp { > > port = 24 > > } > > } > > userdb { > > args = username_format=%u /etc/dovecot/users > > default_fields = uid=vmail gid=vmail home=/home/vmail/%d/%n > > driver = passwd-file > > } > > protocol lmtp { > > mail_plugins = > > } > > > > Since we discovered the errors, we’ve been increasing the > default_vsz_limit to 1G, then 2G and now 4G (Server has 6GB of > memory). These errors occur whenever a large number of emails get > sent around the same time to our smtp server. This causes the dovecot > server to start crunching CPU and Memory. Load average goes through > the roof and takes some time to come back down as the smtp queue > clears itself. > > > > This mailbox is obviously very large but we have a script that runs > daily to delete any emails older than a month: > > > > find /home/vmail/company.com/archive/new/ -type f -mtime +30 -exec rm > {} \; > > find /home/vmail/company.com/archive/cur/ -type f -mtime +30 -exec rm > {} \; > > > > Still, the mailbox has on average of just under 300,000 emails. No > one accesses this mailbox with an email client, not until we need to > dig something up. And this has only happen once. So the emails > pretty much never get read/process by a user. > > > > Now that we’ve increased the default_vsz_limit to 4G, the occurrence > of these errors has reduced considerably. But they still happen > occasionally. Short of increasing the memory further, are there any > other options I have? > > > > Thanks. >