[Dovecot] Stale imap processes

[Brad]

On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 05:38:00PM -0700, Pete Slagle wrote:
> Fran Fabrizio wrote:
> 
> > Anyone have any theories or experiences as to why for a certain user, 
> > some of his imap processes hang, and stay around for days and days?  He 
> > just reported that his Thunderbird was timing out when trying to open 
> > folders, I looked on the server, and he had 3 old imap processes from 1 
> > week+ ago.  I killed those and his performance immediately improved.
> > 
> > He checks mail with Thunderbird > 1.5 from both Win and Linux, 
> > Squirrelmail webmail, and pine.  Of those, pine is the only one that is 
> > somewhat rare around here - any specific problems with pine's imap 
> > client code that anyone knows about?
> > 
> > We have been using the dovecot-1.0-0.beta2.7 rpm for Fedora Core 5, I'm 
> > updating to 1.0-0.beta8.2.fc5 to see if that helps, as well.  Just 
> > curious if anyone else has seen this lately.
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Fran
> 
> I have just seen this problem, big time. I was poking around on a
> FreeBSD 6.1 server because of Thunderbird hangs (see thread
> "dovecot-1.0rc2 problems with Thunderbird" if you are interested), and I
> found over 900 (!) imap process. Only two users were using the dovecot
> server at the time.
> 
> I restarted dovecot, but this did NOT kill the multitudinous imap
> processes. After another restart, with a 'killall imap' in the middle,
> things were temporarily fine, but the number of imap processes
> immediately started to grow again. Apparently they never exit. or use
> any CPU, but just sit around in KQREAD state, eventually getting swapped
> out. No error messages are generated.

Stop using the kqueue support! It is broken and has never fully worked
properly. This is a known issue if you back in the list archives.