dovecot - Feb 2010 - auth processes

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.
I've tried setting each of these below to 0, which resulted in either none,
or
one auth process.  In the case of the one auth process, T-Bird wasn't
working
correctly, although it presented no pop up or other errors.  When I'd click
an
IMAP folder it would just show whitespace and never pull up the emails.

auth_worker_max_count 
# Number of authentication processes to create
   count 
This is an extremely low volume host, and I'm an efficiency freak.  I
don't like
having "unnecessary" processes running if it is at all possible to
avoid it.
Given my IMAP user load, I know for a fact that I should only need one auth
process, and for that matter, given my load, running all the dovecot processes
from inetd is even a valid option, although I've not yet attempted that.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

-- 
Stan

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.
> Given my IMAP user load, I know for a fact that I should only need one auth
> process, and for that matter, given my load, 
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).
> 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.
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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