timeouts when connecting to imap server

[Timo Veith]

Hi,

it probably turned out that it "only" was a configuration problem. I am 
still watching out for any more timeouts, but I think they are gone now.

If you take a short look at my cyrus.conf file (from my initial post) you 
will see that I had two services with "imap" as name. One for localhost 
and one the external ip. Now, I changed the name of the localhost service 
and this seems to fix the problem.

I had two shells open and used the nagios check_imap command in endless 
while loops. On while loop in each shell, one against 127.0.0.1:143 and 
one against <external-ip>:143. When I started the loop command in the 
shell with the external ip separately, the checks were done in a lagging 
manner (very differing reply times and sometimes timeouts). And when I 
started against localhost, the while loop ran through fast, having no 
timeouts.

It was getting funny, when I started the two loops in parallel. As soon as 
the checks against the localhost address were done the other checks were 
running fast, too.

After I found that, I commented the service on localhost in cyrus.conf, 
restarted cyrus and the timeouts were gone.

Does a service name in /etc/cyrus.conf must be unique?

If that is the case it leads me to the question: Shouldn't cyrus be able 
to parse it's config files and report any misconfigurations? At least it 
should refuse to start then. Otherwise one could think everything is ok 
although it isn't. That way one wouldn't have to develop crazy debugging 
techniques. ;) Also the man page of cyrus.conf could say something about 
that. Maybe like so:

--- cut ---
SERVICES
    This section is the heart of the /etc/cyrus.conf file.  It lists
    the processes that should be spawned to handle client connections
    made on certain Internet/UNIX sockets.

    Beware that service names must be unique.
--- cut ---


I would like to thank everyone who answered to me.

Regards,
Timo


PS: I can provide the strace output, if developers want to have it. It 
didn't helped me though.