[Dovecot] 1.0rc_15 - imap-login disappearing

[James Pattinson]

Hi All

I am trying to troubleshoot a problem that's been bugging me for several 
months. About once or twice per week my IMAP server seems to get in a 
state where no connections are possible (Thunderbird hangs at "Connected 
to <server>").

Restarting dovecot completely fixes the problem, until it occurs again, 
hours or days later.

I caught the problem today after I rebooted my server, and monitored the 
running processes while attempting to connect. After each connection 
attempt, the number of imap-idle processes running decremented until 
none at all were running.

Before the final imap-login process died, I attached an instance of 
strace to it - results here:

http://www.pasteserver.net/286

I am running Dovecot 1.0_rc15 on a Gentoo server. It's a vmware virtual 
server - mentioning this now just in case, but I'm confident that's not 
anything to do with it, no other services are having any problems that I 
am aware of.

I am using TLS and Maildir.

I don't know enough about how dovecot is supposed to work, so I would 
appreciate some help in diagnosing this problem!

Cheers,
James