[imp] runnaway processes

[Michael Yingbull]

Uffe Pensar wrote:

> Hi,
>
> We are running  horde 2.2.7/imp-3.2.6 on a Debian woody server with 
> the latest stable releases of php, up-imapproxy, uw-imapd-ssl, mysql, 
> sendmail, clam and apache-ssl . With about little over 100 concurrent 
> users we have a load of 3-10. About 60 % or more use the webinterface. 
> The problem is that sometimes the server load rises rapidly and and we 
> can't see anything strange in the logs (it stops logging). In the end 
> we have to reboot the hard way.
> A couple of time I have seen inetd generating root owned imapd 
> processes (one or two /second) and it wan't stop until inetd is 
> killed. After a reboot  its up and working again.

Those root owned IMAP processes are uw starting up - once there has been 
a login, it will chown the process to the user that logged in.    If you 
are seeing lots of them building up, I'd suspect a problem with your 
authentication.   Most of the time I've had a problem with a sudden load 
average spike (to rediculous levels) it's usually been a network problem 
(do you use ldap for authentication?  nfs mount parts of your mail 
system? etc?).

Check for any problems on any other hosts that tie into that machine in 
any way during that time.    You may want to try having Ethereal handy 
and use it when the problem is happening to see what you see on the 
network.