dovecot/config processes one more time - which are safe to kill?

[Arkadiusz Miśkiewicz]

Hello.

The problem with dovecot/config processes never ending and spawning new
one on each reload
(https://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2016-November/106058.html) is
becoming a problem here:

# ps aux|grep dovecot/config|wc -l
206

That's a lot of wasted memory - dovecot/config processes ate over 30GB
of ram on 64GB box.

Before killing dovecot/config processes:
# free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache
available
Mem:          64437       61656         483           0        2297


after:

# free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache
available
Mem:          64437       23676       37822           0        2939


Currently on dovecot 2.3.3. I guess it's very low priority to handle
that, so: how can I figure out which dovecot/config processes are safe
to be killed by external script?

Does "all beside 2 newest ones" rule look sane?

Thanks,
-- 
Arkadiusz Miśkiewicz, arekm / ( maven.pl | pld-linux.org )