On Qui, 2009-06-25 at 10:01 -0700, V S Rao wrote:

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Hello,

Doing a "ps aux" on my Slackware box, I have approx 100 PID's of "pop3-login's going on. This is a production mail server, but it is getting VERY low traffic. In fact, only 3 people can "pop3" into it. I've check their e-mail clients, and they are not checking mail any more often than every 5 minutes.

This is a new installation and I've had the server up and running since Sunday. If it matters, I'm using Postfix for the MTA and using the Dovecot SASL library to AUTH SMTP.

Is this a cause for concern? Why does Dovecot need this many processes?

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Because dovecot preforks the *-login processes to speed-up the login.

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No need to worry.

100 login sessions for just 3 connections? That is not right, no matter what.

No, login_processes_count matters.

-- Jose Celestino SAPO.pt::Systems http://www.sapo.pt --------------------------------------------------------------------- * Progress (n.): The process through which Usenet has evolved from smart people in front of dumb terminals to dumb people in front of smart terminals.