On Thu, 2008-12-11 at 11:36 +0100, Arno Wald wrote:
I am having a problem with my dovecot-daemon. It is forking one or more (I saw up to perhaps 8 of them) imap processes under my user name. These processes are consuming a lot of CPU time and are not killable:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 8616 arno 20 0 2900 1600 1204 R 98 0.2 1196:38 imap
Stopping dovecot does not quit these processes. Killing them (even "kill -9" as root) is not possible. The only solution to get rid of them is to reboot.
If you can't kill a process with -9, the bug is in the kernel and there's nothing Dovecot can do about it. User spaces processes can't create unkillable processes unless something's broken.
Although you could see if "strace -p <pid>" prints something. It's doubtful though if you can't kill the process.