Hello, On Friday 07 September 2007 05:38:15 Peter Mann wrote: I have one very stupid suggestion. So stupid, it may actually make sense, even though the bit "on production server 2-3 years without such problem" might render my suggestion a no-go. Maybe during the normal operation the kernel is not able to gather enough entropy and if that is needed during pop connection shutdown, processes will stall and wait until they get their precious random data from /dev/random. After enabling connection logging there's suddenly enough activity in the system so kernel is able to harvest entropy and fill the entropy pool. Please try cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail just when the processes start to pile up. If the number is 0, your system has run out of entropy. If that's the problem, you need to make Perdition (or saslauthd/sasl libraries?) to get their random data from /dev/urandom instead. Another option is to install rngd, which shovels semi-random numbers from /dev/urandom to /dev/random, making sure entropy pool has something to give out any time. rngd is available in package rng-tools (at least in Gentoo). Best regards, Janne Pikkarainen