On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 10:58 +0200, Martijn de Munnik wrote:
Hi,
I'm using dovecot for the first time on a production server (before
dovecot I used bincimapd). I have a question about the number of imap
(not imap-login) processes created for a user. I've seen 100+
processes for just 1 user. So far it only occurs for 1 user, other
users have just 1 imap process. I now the user is using thunderbird
and 2 mailclients are logged in at the same time (one workstation and
one laptop). Is there an issue with dovecot/thunderbird?
I think Thunderbird's default is to create max. 5 connections to the server, so 100+ processes isn't normal for a single user. Have you checked if there's anything in Dovecot's error logs (http://wiki.dovecot.org/Logging)?
Anyway it's possible that there's nothing wrong in Dovecot's side and TB is just misbehaving for some reason, like maybe got confused by the switch from binc imap? Recreating the account might help.
With Dovecot v1.1 it's possible to limit the max. number of processes per user per IP address (set to 10 by default). That would also solve your problem (but maybe not the user's problem).