Hello there,

I have a problem I'd appreciate if anybody could help me to solve it. I have a Gentoo server with IMAP access through SSL. Everything works but every once in a month the saslauthd process gets 100% of the CPU and sucks all my CPU quota until I kill it. I have to restart the process and then everything works normally. Any idea how that could happen or how I could check what the problem is? Is there any program that I could install to notify me whenever something is taking my server resources by email?

cheers
Hamid

While I didn't have any such problem with Cyrus saslauthd, I do have a possible workaround. Recently I switched away from Cyrus IMAP to Dovecot IMAP and found it wastly superior, at least for small time specs I require. The IDLE works nicely and overall it's such a neat peace of software. It also comes with its own SASL implementation and authentication daemon. The Dovecot auth daemon can support pretty much any auth mechanizm, unlike saslauthd, which does only LOGIN over its socket.

thanks a lot for your suggestion. I wish I had setup that up in the first place. It's just so difficult and time consuming to install a mail server that I'd rather to find a fix for the current one. If I couldn't find why it keeps doing that I'll have to abandon it completely I guess.

Long ago I had service at another, lesser, unnamed host provider.

They abruptly terminated my account for "using too much CPU".

When I asked them what they meant, pointing out that they
allowed user scripts to run on their hosting server, they would
not explain or give any detail whatsoever. After much begging
they cracked open the door and kicked out my email files before
slamming it shut.

Here, there is explicit CPU sharing and *no* CPU quota as such.
If two Linodes on the same host server need CPU at the same time,
they share 50/50 and that's that.

James

good to know that!

so what is that CPU bar that says

"Your Linode has averaged
blah%
of one Host CPU for this month"

that's why I thought there's a quota of CPU time. Is that just for information?

Yes.

James