In recent days, dovecot's "imap" processes keep getting stuck. Each time I check my server (running dovecot 1.1.7) there's a bunch of "imap" processes (sometimes 2 of them, sometimes 4, sometimes 6) that are using all of the box's CPU.
And worse, there's no way to kill the processes either (neither kill -15 or kill -9 works), which means that I wind up having to reboot the box every time this happens. REALLY irritating.
I don't normally even *see* the imap processes in htop, as I think they're pretty short lived. And I'm not sure what they're looping trying to do. My debugging skills on Linux are a bit weak, and so I don't know how to look at the process and see what it's doing.
Also, not sure what's changed on my system to cause this, as this is definitely a recent problem. Maybe the upgrade to Thunderbird 2.0.0.18 (since I usually use T'Bird to access my email). I don't seem to run into this problem when I use Squirrelmail.
Anyone have any idea what the problem might be? Or, if not, then suggestions on how I might be able to debug the situation myself?
TIA,
DR