Hi,
When a user is doing a search, and the data is not indexed, then a search can take a very long time. It seems that search process is uninterruptable. The IMAP connection gets a status message with an ETA every so often, but an administrator on the server cannot stop it. Any SIGTERM or doveadm kick is ignored. Also, when the client times out (it seems clients are not seeing the ETA as a reason to keep the connection open) and the client disconnects is this search process continuing, even though any write to the socket would return an error.
I believe the server is stuck in this loop: https://github.com/dovecot/core/blob/master/src/lib-storage/index/index-sear...
Somehow the server needs to check for disconnected clients and let the session be kicked from the server too. You probably know better what to do about this then me.
John
Amazon Development Center (Netherlands) B.V., Johanna Westerdijkplein 1, 2521 EN The Hague, Registration No. Chamber of Commerce 56869649, VAT: NL 852339859B01