POP3d won't timeout, seems stuck on a write.

[Sebastian Hagedorn]

--On 2. August 2010 09:13:29 -0800 Matthew Schumacher 
<matt.s at aptalaska.net> wrote:

> I have the latest cyrus 2.3.16 but I run into frequent pop lock issues
> where the pop3 server process just won't timeout and it locks the
> account.  I have used a patch followed on this list that allows me to
> set a pop3timeout less than 10 minutes and currently it's set at 3
> minutes but that didn't help because the server doesn't seem to honor
> any timeout.
>
> To test that the client isn't sending anything, I connected to the
> process with strace and it shows absolutely nothing going:
>
> root at server:/var/log# time strace -p 16996
> Process 16996 attached - interrupt to quit
> write(1, "3nI8\212S%\315\n\221\363m\213\203\377\3101\30(\334\332"..., 2762
>
>  <unfinished ...>
> Process 16996 detached
>
> real	17m0.327s
> user	0m0.000s
> sys	0m0.004s
>
>
>
> It looks like it's stuck on a write of some kind, but that is blocking
> the timeout.
>
> Anyone have any ideas?  This problem is causing upper management to want
> to switch to exchange and I really don't want to deal with that.

FWIW, there *used* to be many problems like that, but that was in earlier 
releases. I worked with the developers to fix those issues. At our site we 
haven't had that problem since (we're running 2.3.14 now), so I'm not sure 
why you're still seeing any. FWIW, the stuck process that we saw were all 
TLS or SSL connections of dial-up clients. When the dial-up connection got 
dropped at the wrong moment, the processes stuck around forever. Before the 
fix I had implemented a cronjob that regularly killed old pop3 processes, 
because no pop3 process should live longer than maybe 30 minutes ...

Check the archive for "stuck processes" for details.
-- 
     .:.Sebastian Hagedorn - RZKR-R1 (Gebäude 52), Zimmer 18.:.
                 .:.Regionales Rechenzentrum (RRZK).:.
.:.Universität zu Köln / Cologne University - ✆ +49-221-478-5587.:.
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