Imapd - more processes than maxchild

[Andrew Morgan]

On Thu, 31 Jul 2014, Fabio S. Schmidt wrote:

> Hi !
>
> I'm trying to fix an environment which has been growing without proper
> attention.
>
> There are about 7000 inboxes but only 5000 are active and the maxchilds
> parameter is set as "2000" causing a lot of timeouts when the clients try
> to connect. I thought as a first approach trying to increase this parameter.
>
> I have noticed that even with the "maxchilds" parameter set as "2000" there
> are about 2020 processes open, is this behaviour normal?  The version in
> use is 2.4.12.

Are there really 2000+ IMAP clients trying to connect?  Try "ps -ef | grep 
imapd | wc -l".

It's also possible that there is an IMAP client running wild, making 
hundreds of connections.  The output of "netstat -nt" might show you if 
there are a lot of connections from a single IP address.

If you really need to allow more connections, increase the maxchilds 
parameter.  Beware that you don't overload the server, either with too 
much I/O or not enough RAM available!  :)

 	Andy