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.
----
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