org.dovecot.fts.update is crashing

I have seen this issue too, on three different Lion servers (10.7.1) on which mail services are enabled. I'm not yet sure what the problem (if any) is, and how to fix it.

I am going to paste a sample log message below, since "throttling" is misspelled in your original post, and may keep this thread from being found by those searching for this issue:

com.apple.launchd[1] (org.dovecot.fts.update): Throttling respawn: Will start in 1 seconds

Rusty

Anyone heard anything on this? I'm getting this same exact thing in my logs too. Lion Server / Mac mini / 10.7.1.

Amazing work, Stress Test.

I'm going to test this on one of my own installations, and I'll report back here.

Rusty

Ah, interesting.

That file didn't exist on my test system. The contents of /var/db/dovecot.fts.update/ were already empty, and yet the logs continue to complain:

com.apple.launchd[1] (org.dovecot.fts.update): Throttling respawn: Will start in 7 seconds

Rusty

Mail service is active.

Mail is being fetched by a variety of IMAP clients.

Fetchmail is not in use.

Same error here... Lion Server 10.7.1 running Mail service with active OD accounts. Mail is being fetched with Mail.app from a variety of client OS including Lion, Snow Leopard, and Leopard. Error messages began cropping up after running the server for a few days. Here's a log excerpt from System.log.

Sep 15 08:17:14 smtp com.apple.launchd[1] (org.dovecot.fts.update): Throttling respawn: Will start in 9 seconds

Sep 15 08:17:25 smtp com.apple.launchd[1] (org.dovecot.fts.update): Throttling respawn: Will start in 8 seconds

Sep 15 08:17:35 smtp com.apple.launchd[1] (org.dovecot.fts.update): Throttling respawn: Will start in 9 seconds

Sep 15 08:18:13 smtp com.apple.launchd[1] (org.dovecot.fts.update): Throttling respawn: Will start in 2 seconds

Sep 15 08:18:22 smtp com.apple.launchd[1] (org.dovecot.fts.update): Throttling respawn: Will start in 4 seconds

Stress Test wrote:

Rusty Ross wrote:

Mail service is active.

Mail is being fetched by a variety of IMAP clients.

Your server is a mail-server with a public IP-address where the mails are sent to? Or how do you get the mails to the server?

That's right. A fully-public MTA.

Also note that I have observed this issue on multiuple Lion Server boxes, all of which basically fit the same criteria as the specific machine I am describing here.

So based on my reading[1] - here is what I think is happening. (The short story - this is behaving as expected.)

When email is received by dovecot, it modifies a file in the queue directory, triggering launchd to update the full text search index.

Launchd, wisely, doesn't want to re-run the update script too often for efficiency purposes, so if a new file is placed in the queue directory within 8-10 seconds after the prior script finishes (e.g. from a new email), will delay running the update script.

So, in my opinion, the main problem is the spamming of the logs with the launchd messages.

[1]: http://hintsforums.macworld.com/showthread.php?t=89795

> 05-19-2008, 05:55 PM

> the "Throttling respawn" message is an intentional behavior of launchd; it tries to conserve system resources by preventing a job from running more frequently than every 8 or 10 seconds (if you need something that needs to check in with the system more frequently than that, you can either override the respawn limit or construct your script as a stay-open script, rather than as a triggered or timed script). as to why you're getting this message... at a guess, either your script is taking longer than 300 seconds to execute (which will keep launchd continually trying to launch it, and continually choking because the job is already running), or you've got some other trigger than the 300 second one which is getting in the way.

Thanks for this, ckillian. Makes alot of sense.

I had this same problem. The resolution for me was to:

1) From the Server application, click your server in the left pane.

2) Click the Settings tab

3) Click the Edit button next to SSL Certificate

4) Choose an SSL cert from the dropdownlist, and save

I use a self-signed cert because my server isn't visible to anything but my home network. Hopefully this will help other people resolve the same issue on their servers.