dovecot - Dec 2003 - Rogue child imap processes when using Mac imap clients

hi all-

I am currently running dovecot 0.99.10p2 on OpenBSD-3.4-snapshot. It has 
been very stable, but I have recently noticed that I am having problems 
when checking IMAP-SSL mail with Mac OS X clients. There are not 
problems using Mozilla or Outlook on Windows, but Mac clients 
(Thunderbird, Mozilla, Mail.app) all exhibit the same behavior - they 
can check and send mail, but I end up with a single, rogue child imap 
process on the server that pins the cpu that i have to 'kill -9' to 
clear out.

Is this a Mac problem or a Dovecot problem? I'm not even sure what to 
look for in the logs...

Thanks,
Darren David

On Dec 8, 2003, at 7:28 PM, darren david wrote:
> I am currently running dovecot 0.99.10p2 on OpenBSD-3.4-snapshot. It 
> has been very stable, but I have recently noticed that I am having 
> problems when checking IMAP-SSL mail with Mac OS X clients. There are 
> not problems using Mozilla or Outlook on Windows, but Mac clients 
> (Thunderbird, Mozilla, Mail.app) all exhibit the same behavior - they 
> can check and send mail, but I end up with a single, rogue child imap 
> process on the server that pins the cpu that i have to 'kill -9' to
> clear out.
>
> Is this a Mac problem or a Dovecot problem? I'm not even sure what to 
> look for in the logs...
Hmm. Check with ktrace what the imap process is doing and send the log 
to me? (I'm not exactly sure how ktrace worked, it was a bit weird.) 
And maybe check with gdb too where it's stuck at (gdb 
/usr/local/lib/dovecot/imap <pid> and "bt" command). Or is it
imap
process or imap-login process?

Anyway, I haven't noticed problems with Mail.app.

On 2003-12-08, darren david <darren at 3x3x3.org>
wrote:
> but Mac
> clients (Thunderbird, Mozilla, Mail.app) all exhibit the same
> behavior - they can check and send mail, but I end up with a single,
> rogue child imap process on the server that pins the cpu that i have
> to 'kill -9' to clear out.
A friend of mine who runs dovecot 0.99.10.2 on freebsd/alpha (from
ports, thus the low version number) just reported this same symptom to
me. Apparently, dovecot runs fine for a few days, and then an imap
process hogs 100% cpu and has to be killed I'll see if I can get a
ktrace from it.
> Is this a Mac problem or a Dovecot problem? I'm not even sure what
> to look for in the logs...
Remarkably, he too is using a Mac OSX client - mulberry, though.

We'll see soon enough, I think.

Good luck hunting the bug,
-- 
Andreas Fuchs, <asf at boinkor.net>, asf at jabber.at, antifuchs