[Dovecot] auth processes

[Stan Hoeppner]

Timo Sirainen put forth on 2/18/2010 9:17 AM:
> On Tue, 2010-02-16 at 08:16 -0600, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
>> With 1.0.15 my configuration I a single dovecot-auth process, which is what I
>> want now.  Since upgrading to 1.2.10 I have two such processes:
>>
>> root     16992 16990  0 Feb15 ?        00:00:00 dovecot-auth
>> root     16997 16990  0 Feb15 ?        00:00:00 dovecot-auth -w
>>
>> I can't seem to tweak dovecot.conf to get this down to one auth process again.
> 
> Are you using passwd/pam combination? The second process is "auth
> worker", which does blocking passdb/userdb lookups. The v1.0 behavior
> was causing bugs.

Yep:
auth default:
  worker_max_count: 1
  process_size: 16
  passdb:
    driver: pam
  userdb:
    driver: passwd

If this is what the worker does, what does the "master" do?

> Currently there's no way to avoid that, except if you switch from PAM to
> e.g. shadow. v2.0 stops idling processes after a minute (but there are a
> some other new long running processes, and also it looks like that
> idle-stopping isn't currently working for some reason).

IIRC both dovecot-auth processes are staying resident even with no clients
connected.

>> running all the dovecot processes
>> from inetd is even a valid option, although I've not yet attempted that.
> 
> That won't help anyway. You'd still have the same processes.

It's not that big a deal.  I just didn't realize this had changed since 1.0.15,
so I thought I just needed to tweak something to ditch the extra process.  If
both auth processes are required for pam/passwd to function correctly in 1.2.10
then that's fine by me.

Thanks Timo.

-- 
Stan