[Dovecot] Debugging with strace

[Fran Fabrizio]

We have a dovecot install that is working fine for everyone except one 
user, who complains that it takes a minute or longer to delete a single 
message from the INBOX to Trash.  This is happening for him from 
multiple IMAP clients so it appears to be server-side.

I wanted to start up a test instance of dovecot alongside the production 
one and test there.  So I copied dovecot.conf, put imap on port 10143, 
and started up the test server like this:

# strace -tt dovecot -F -c /etc/dovecottest.conf

(I could not find the docs for -F but without it dovecot would quickly 
detatch into a daemon and I could no longer strace it... so is -F for 
putting dovecot in the foreground like I think?  :-)

I noticed two things when I did this:

1.  My screen just scrolled continuously with poll calls - does dovecot 
poll something every second even when it has no clients connected?

2.  It appeared to interfere with the production install running 
alongside of it - as I could no longer authenticate to it or copy 
messages to my Sent folder when I sent something out through the 
production dovecot.  I had to restart the production instance to get it 
to behave.

So my questions are whether all that polling output is normal and also, 
is my testing method really interfering with the production server, and 
if so, how to avoid that?

Thanks,
Fran

-- 
Fran Fabrizio
Senior Systems Analyst
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham
http://www.cis.uab.edu/
205.934.0653