[Dovecot] Strange Login / Timeout Sessions

[Carlos Mennens]

I have my webmail application tied to Postfix / Dovecot server & now
for some reason the IMAP sessions oddly time out throughout the day
and then logging back into the mail system over the web is painfully
slow. The only thing I've seen that fixes it is to reload the Dovecot
daemon in Linux:

/etc/init.d/dovecot reload

Once that command is ran, my webmail login is super fast and moving
from folder to folder is extremely fast again. Then in about a few
hours, the session will time out and this problem repeats. The problem
is the same for everyone and not just a few user accounts. Anyone have
any idea what I should be looking for or looking at? My Dovecot logs
or mixed in /var/log/maillog which is extremely hard to watch live &
gets mixed with Postfix, Amavisd, and Postgrey. Any ideas or
suggestions to narrow this problem out?

I'm running Dovecot-1.0.7-7.el5_7.1.

I saw this load on the console today:

Error: Dovecot is already running with PID 2334 (read from
/var/run/dovecot/master.pid)
Fatal: Invalid configuration in /etc/dovecot.conf

Below is my configuration file:

[root at mail ~]# dovecot -n
# 1.0.7: /etc/dovecot.conf
protocols: imap
ssl_ca_file: /etc/ssl/certs/digicert.crt
ssl_cert_file: ***OMIT***
ssl_key_file: ***OMIT***
login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login
login_executable: /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
mail_location: maildir:~/Maildir
auth default:
  mechanisms: plain login
  passdb:
    driver: pam
  userdb:
    driver: passwd
  socket:
    type: listen
    client:
      path: /var/spool/postfix/private/auth
      mode: 432
      user: postfix
      group: postfix