Ok to kill single imapd processes?

[Kevin M. Myer]

Hello,

We are running an installation of Cyrus IMAPd.  There is one particular imapd
process hanging around that has been terminated on the other end (i.e. laptop
is no longer there, device in between doing NAT has been rebooted and our
firewall shows no connection).  However, the mail server still thinks the
connection is open.

http://asg.web.cmu.edu/archive/message.php?mailbox=archive.info-cyrus&searchterm=kill&msg=28259
pretty much describes the symptoms we are seeing.  There are cyrus.cache.NEW
and cyrus.index.NEW files hanging around, although as Rob points out, these are
often red herrings.  However, mail cannot currently be delivered to this user
and the timestamp of the last mail delivery is just a little before those new
files were created.  The mail client is Thunderbird and if the creation of the
.NEW files is related to an expunge, then likely, this user was logging out of
Thunderbird at the time.

My overall question would be:  can I safely kill the two phantom imapd processes
that are hanging around?  I know they're managed by the master process but
their existence is apparently causing message delivery to fail via LMTP for
this user and the mail server is delivering mail with minutes of delay instead
of seconds for all users.  I'm fairly certain its all related but I really
don't want to bounce the entire master process in the middle of the day, unless
things continue to deteriorate.

Version info:  Red Hat Linux 7.3, Cyrus IMAPd 2.1.11, using skiplist for mbox
and seen, db3 for duplicate and tls, and flat for subs.

Kevin

--
Kevin M. Myer
Systems Administrator
Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13
(717) 560-6140

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