Experiencing high system overload with dovecot

[Miguel_Tellería]

[Plesk 12.0.18 Microupdate #70, CentOS 6.6]

Dear all,

In the "last days" (1-2 weeks ago) we are experiencing rises in system load due to dovecot IMAP and POP login.

The uptime load raises to infinity and htop points to dovecot as the CPU eater. Once we stop dovecot (stopping Plesk watchdog) and later start it the system goes back to normal.

Dovecot version installed:

rpm -qa | grep dovecot
plesk-dovecot-2.2.12-cos6.build1200140617.16.x86_64
plesk-dovecot-pigeonhole-0.4.2-cos6.build1200140527.14.x86_64
plesk-dovecot-imap-driver-12.0.18-cos6.build1200140606.15.x86_64
plesk-dovecot-core-2.2.12-cos6.build1200140617.16.x86_64

Is someone else experiencing the same problem?

Could this be a side-effect of Plesk Microupdates? (we see this in more than one server)

Sorry for being a little fuzzy for the moment but we don't have any more solid details. I just want to see if we are the only ones with this problem.

Regards,

Miguel Telleria

 

[Jose_Antonio_Morales]

do you have big email acounts? In the past... I´ve had some clients that have massive inbox (beyond 2 GB and more) that makes the same high load... getting high iowait (because the dovecot is reading high amounts of data from the disk) thus making the load increase...

stopping it makes the client stop using the mail... and the server goes down on load.... the effect restarts eventually when the client uses the mail again...