[Dovecot] Stale imap processes

[Renaud Allard]

The processes just stay there forever and at some point just hit the per 
user processes limit. They just never die, they don't use any CPU at 
all, but just stay there without any client connection. On BSD building 
dovecot with kqueue solved the problem.

Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-08-03 at 15:58 -0500, Fran Fabrizio wrote:
>> Ok, my head is swimming after catching up, but I think this is what I've 
>> concluded...
>>
>> I am using Fedora Core 5 and dovecot RPMs.  The RPM that shipped with 
>> FC5 was:
>>
>> dovecot-1.0-0.beta2.7
>>
>> after observing the stale imap processed I upgraded this to:
>>
>> 1.0-0.beta8.2.fc5
>>
>> Both of these are built with ioloop=poll.
>>
>> I am still seeing the stale processes with beta8.  Sounds like I need to 
>> build from source using ioloop=kqueue to maybe clear up this issue.  Did 
>> I interpret this correctly?  And should I stick with beta8 or move to rc2?
> 
> kqueue is BSD-specific feature, so you can't use it with Linux.
> 
> But I'd like to know what exactly does "stale processes" mean: Do you
> use SSL and they're all SSL connections? Are they eating any CPU at all?
> If you strace them, does it show if they're doing anything? How long are
> they stuck, or don't they ever die?
> 
> How exactly do you know they are stale? Are you sure there aren't any
> clients that still have active connections to it?
>