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

[Patrick Boutilier]

On 08/05/2010 06:02 AM, Sebastian Hagedorn wrote:
> --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.
>


What OS are you using? It almost sounds like your Cyrus is using 
/dev/random instead of /dev/urandom.

Are you using a packaged version of Cyrus or one you compiled yourself?



> 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.
>
>
>
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