On Sat, 2006-11-18 at 23:12 +0200, Timo Sirainen wrote:
On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 22:39 -0300, Ricardo Dias Campos wrote:
Then a new problem arose: the time between hang-ups begun to diminish. Trying to find why I discovered that the number or dovecot-auth processes was too high (last time I got 169 processes, a lot of them <defuncts>). It seems that, if I kill all these processes, it takes more time before it hangs again.
Well, this is your problem. I guess you're using PAM? So it sounds like you're using some PAM plugin which hangs and causes Dovecot to break.
As I said, I'm using Fedora 5 and the version distributed with it was dovecot-1.0-0.beta2.7.i386. I upgraded it to dovecot-1.0-0.beta8.2.fc5.i386.
beta8 is half a year old, and I've done several fixes since then. Upgrading might help, but I think it's a problem with your PAM configuration anyway.
Actually if it's only the <defunct> processes that keep adding up, then it's a bug in dovecot-auth. I haven't heard of this happening with newer 1.0rcs, so I'd suggest upgrading first.