2.3.14: stale imap-login processes due to bogus user setup tying up process limit

[Chad Wallace]

Hello!

We've had this same thing happening on our dovecot install.  Now and
then the imap server stops accepting connections because of the number
of imap-login processes.  The process_limit for imap-login is set to
1024.  Restarting dovecot clears it up for a while.

I turned on verbose_proctitle, and found that the stale processes all
say "pre-login".  The start times all coincide with an invalid login
attempt to the IMAP server.

We are using LDAP as our userdb.

We are using dovecot-imapd version 1:2.3.13+dfsg1-2 on Debian bullseye.

We also had this same thing happen years ago with a similar setup.  I
never got around to investigating it as much, so I don't know if it's
exactly the same, but it did show a bunch of extra imap-login
processes, and we would clear it up by restarting dovecot.

Should I file a bug report?

Thanks!
Chad.