[Dovecot] High CPU load

[Nagy László]

  Hello,

I'm using dovecot-1.0.b9 on a FreeBSD 6.1 system. Usually we have 6 
clients connected to dovecot through IMAPs. These clients are 
Thunderbird 1.5 programs. After some hours, one or two processed go up 
to 100% WCPU. As an example, this is what I see when I run 'top':

last pid:  5111;  load averages:  1.34,  1.82,  1.75   up 13+00:04:09  
15:26:59
150 processes: 2 running, 147 sleeping, 1 zombie
CPU states: 21.2% user,  0.0% nice, 47.7% system,  0.0% interrupt, 31.1% 
idle
Mem: 149M Active, 368M Inact, 196M Wired, 29M Cache, 111M Buf, 255M Free
Swap: 5120M Total, 548M Used, 4572M Free, 10% Inuse

  PID USERNAME       THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE  C   TIME   WCPU 
COMMAND
52627 thomas           1 109    0  2940K  1500K CPU1   0  21:49 99.02% imap


When there are two rebellious clients, they occupy 50-50% CPU time. If I 
restart thunderbird, then all goes well for a couple of minutes. I need 
to solve this problem. I already had a system crash that was probably 
caused by the cpu heat. Pleas help me.

   Laszlo