Hi,

Not sure if this is relevant but having been running dovecot 1.1.4 for a long time (without any problem) I recently upgraded to 1.1.7 when I switched to SuSE 11.1 This is just running on my home server and it's a fairly standard fetchmail-procmail-dovecot setup.

However I recently had an incident which I cannot quite explain. I suspect it could be a possible disk problem but I did run a SMART check and the disks and HW seems ok. The mail store is mounted on a separate partition using ext3 fs

What happened was that I noticed that the load on my server went through the roof and that the imap process was hogging 100% of the CPU and it had been running so for over an hour.

Before this happened I had just setup a new laptop with Thunderbird as the mail client and had just done a off-line sync of my whole mail store (~1.5GB). So for a short time the dovecot server would have been under maximum load.

I tried to recover by gracefully shutting down dovecot and when that didn't stop the imap process I first tried to be nice by sending it the TERM signal and when that didn't do it, the KILL signal.

However, I was not able to stop the imap process. I then decided to recycle the server and initiated a shutdown. However, not even that was able to complete (since the shutdown process seemed to be hanging on not being able to stop the imap process). In the end I was (for the first time in over 6 years) forced to use the hard reset button on the server.

I do realize that this is almost impossible to diagnose, but does anyone now in general what could possible cause the imap process to so completely be locked up that it is impossible to even shut it down?

The dovecot -n output is

1.1.7: /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf # OS: Linux 2.6.27.7-9-pae i686 openSUSE 11.1 (i586) ext3 log_path: /var/log/dovecot.err info_log_path: /var/log/dovecot.info login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login login_executable: /usr/lib/dovecot/imap-login login_processes_count: 2 login_max_processes_count: 2 login_max_connections: 5 max_mail_processes: 32 mail_max_userip_connections: 8 mail_location: maildir:/srv/mail/%u mailbox_idle_check_interval: 15 fsync_disable: yes auth default: passdb: driver: pam userdb: driver: passwd

Cheers Johan