Hello David Rosenstrauch wrote:
In recent days, dovecot's "imap" processes keep getting stuck. Each time I check my server there's a bunch of "imap" processes (sometimes 2 of them, sometimes 4, sometimes 6) that are using all of the box's CPU.
And worse, there's no way to kill the processes either (neither kill -15 or kill -9 works), which means that I wind up having to reboot the box every time this happens. REALLY irritating.
I don't normally even *see* the imap processes in htop, as I think they're pretty short lived. And I'm not sure what they're looping trying to do. My debugging skills on Linux are a bit weak, and so I don't know how to look at the process and see what it's doing.
I see quite a few imap (and imap-login) processes hanging around, always have. But they are generally idling, not using 100% CPU like in your case.
Also, not sure what's changed on my system to cause this, as this is definitely a recent problem. Maybe the upgrade to Thunderbird 2.0.0.18 (since I usually use T'Bird to access my email). I don't seem to run into this problem when I use Squirrelmail.
Interesting. If this really is a fault then a bugreport must be sent to the dovecot developper with high priority (as this could lead to a DoS attack) and to the mozilla team indicating something's wrong with how they talk to certain IMAP servers.
Anyone have any idea what the problem might be? Or, if not, then suggestions on how I might be able to debug the situation myself?
Start here: http://www.dovecot.org/bugreport.html Glenn