[Dovecot] unkillable imap process(es) with high CPU-usage

[Timo Sirainen]

On Thu, 2008-12-11 at 11:36 +0100, Arno Wald wrote:
> I am having a problem with my dovecot-daemon. It is forking one or more
> (I saw up to perhaps 8 of them) imap processes under my user name. These
> processes are consuming a lot of CPU time and are not killable:
> 
> >  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
> > 8616 arno      20   0  2900 1600 1204 R   98  0.2   1196:38 imap
> 
> Stopping dovecot does not quit these processes. Killing them (even "kill
> -9" as root) is not possible. The only solution to get rid of them is to
> reboot.

If you can't kill a process with -9, the bug is in the kernel and
there's nothing Dovecot can do about it. User spaces processes can't
create unkillable processes unless something's broken.

Although you could see if "strace -p <pid>" prints something. It's
doubtful though if you can't kill the process.

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