[Dovecot] 1.0.5: many pop3-login processes?

[Alan Ferrency]

Hello,

> Do you have lots of login attempts? If you have more than 64 concurrent
> POP3 login attempts, you'll get 128 pop3-login processes.
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/LoginProcess explains more.

I finally got a chance to check this out, and it does not seem to
explain what's going on with my system.

On this particular server we have exactly 2 different users who log in
via POP, and they seem to be set up to log in automatically once every
10 minutes.

imap-login process count is reasonable: there are 11 processes running
and it doesn't seem to increase.  pop3-login is the issue.

I notice in the logs, that the number of imap-login Login: lines matches
the number of Disconnect: lines in the log. For pop3-login, there are
111 Login: lines and only 8 Disconnect: lines. However, there are no
pop3 processes currently running, as far as I can tell.

So this seems like it may be related to a misbehaving POP client, but
I'd expect the pop3-login processes to die off anyway.

I'm using the default login_* settings.

Any more insight on this?

Thanks!
Alan Ferrency
pair Networks, Inc.
alan at pair.com


On Sun, 30 Sep 2007, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 17:22 -0400, Alan Ferrency wrote:
> > We are running dovecot 1.0.5 on a test server, with FreeBSD 6.2
> > (though I have noticed the same problem since dovecot versions in the
> > 0.99 range).
> >
> > We don't have very many simultaneous pop/imap users, but we have a
> > proliferation of pop3-login processes.
> >
> > Currently we have 128 such processes. We have 11 imap-login processes,
> > but only a few actual imap processes running.
> >
> > Is this normal?  Can we stop it?
>
> Do you have lots of login attempts? If you have more than 64 concurrent
> POP3 login attempts, you'll get 128 pop3-login processes.
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/LoginProcess explains more.
>
>