[Dovecot] High CPU load

[Dominic Marks]

Nagy László wrote:
> 
>  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.

You can limit the user's CPU on the server via login.conf as a work 
around? Also disable kqueue support as Timo instructed.

Cheers,
Dominic

>   Laszlo
>