Pre-forking strange behaviour

[marc.bigler at day.com]

Hello,

I've just remarked a strange behaviour of the master process presumably. I
am using the same cyrus.conf as the prefork.conf example configuration
file.

So now what I've remarked is that just after starting cyrus's master
process it starts the following processes:

hostname% ps -fu cyrus
     UID   PID  PPID  C    STIME TTY      TIME CMD
   cyrus   855   846  0 23:15:12 pts/1    0:00 lmtpd
   cyrus   852   846  0 23:15:11 pts/1    0:00 imapd -s
   cyrus   854   846  0 23:15:12 pts/1    0:00 pop3d -s
   cyrus   853   846  0 23:15:11 pts/1    0:00 pop3d
   cyrus   850   846  0                   0:00 <defunct>
   cyrus   851   846  0 23:15:11 pts/1    0:00 imapd
   cyrus   846     1  0 23:15:10 pts/1    0:00 /opt/cyrimap/bin/master

As you can see here the is a zombie process "<defunct>" and it didn't fork
the processes correctly as in the config file (5 imapd, 3 pop3, and so on).
But after waiting 1 or sometimes 2 minutes then it forks all the required
processes correctly as you can see here:

hostname% ps -fu cyrus
     UID   PID  PPID  C    STIME TTY      TIME CMD
   cyrus   859   846  0 23:17:28 pts/1    0:00 imapd
   cyrus   861   846  0 23:17:28 pts/1    0:00 imapd
   cyrus   864   846  0 23:17:29 pts/1    0:00 pop3d
   cyrus   863   846  0 23:17:29 pts/1    0:00 pop3d
   cyrus   855   846  0 23:15:12 pts/1    0:00 lmtpd
   cyrus   862   846  0 23:17:29 pts/1    0:00 imapd
   cyrus   852   846  0 23:15:11 pts/1    0:00 imapd -s
   cyrus   860   846  0 23:17:28 pts/1    0:00 imapd
   cyrus   854   846  0 23:15:12 pts/1    0:00 pop3d -s
   cyrus   853   846  0 23:15:11 pts/1    0:00 pop3d
   cyrus   851   846  0 23:15:11 pts/1    0:00 imapd
   cyrus   846     1  0 23:15:10 pts/1    0:00 /opt/cyrimap/bin/master

So seeing this behaviour I wanted to ask on this mailing list if this is a
normal behaviour ? I am not so sure but I would say no. At least everything
works fine... but I don't think this is normal. As OS I am using Solaris 9
on a Sun box.

Many thanks

Regards