[Dovecot] Stale imap processes

[Fran Fabrizio]

Ok, my head is swimming after catching up, but I think this is what I've 
concluded...

I am using Fedora Core 5 and dovecot RPMs.  The RPM that shipped with 
FC5 was:

dovecot-1.0-0.beta2.7

after observing the stale imap processed I upgraded this to:

1.0-0.beta8.2.fc5

Both of these are built with ioloop=poll.

I am still seeing the stale processes with beta8.  Sounds like I need to 
build from source using ioloop=kqueue to maybe clear up this issue.  Did 
I interpret this correctly?  And should I stick with beta8 or move to rc2?

Thanks,
Fran

Renaud Allard wrote:
>>> Unfortunately, I had the problem on OpenBSD with dovecot 1.0rc2. Stale
>>> imap processes when _NOT_ using kqueue (using poll). Using kqueue solved
>>> the problem. Not sure if it's the same on FreeBSD, but it seems that
>>> using kqueue solves the stale processes problem both on OpenBSD and
>>> NetBSD. On linux, kqueue doesn't produce stale imap processes either.
>>  
>> I have had a number of reports that kqueue, specifically kqueue for
>> the file change mechanism (--with-notify=kqueue), causes the hanging
>> and disabling this allowed regular operation. kqueue for the I/O loop
>> mechanism causes dovecot processes to crash under certain (unknown)
>> conditions. If poll is causing problems then there are definitely some
>> nasty bugs lurking in the code base. The problem with the file change
>> mechanism and kqueue popped up somewhere between beta8 and rc2.
> 
> I use --with-ioloop=kqueue
> I had no problems with beta8, and noticed stale imap processes after
> upgrading to rc2. Someone suggested using --with-ioloop=kqueue and this
> indeed solved my problem.
> Note that while I have no more imap processes hanging, I noticed that
> sometimes thunderbird complains about being unable to copy mails in sent
> folder. This wasn't the case in beta8.
> 
> 


-- 
Fran Fabrizio
Senior Systems Analyst
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham
http://www.cis.uab.edu/
205.934.0653