Hello,

Thank you for your response.

Thank you for the tip. We do have a custom authentication script but I'd be looking at that instead of bugging you here if it were really taking anywhere near that long :D

I looked into the most recent release of dovecot and there are actually two conditions which can trigger that message. I don't want to spam this list with discussion of another software but dovecot is quite widely used so I guess it may interest other users of nginx if this behaviour is new or rare:

The other test checks if there is an established connection to the authentication process and stops processing commands if there isn't, writing the waiting message to tell the client that it can expect a slight pause. I saw the number of running authentication processes increasing and descreasing fairly quickly but I don't yet know how dovecot is managing its authentication pool so I can only guess at what's happening here without looking into it.

It's still possible that I'm causing the problem somehow so I'll take a closer look and speak with the dovecot people if needed. Removing line 349 in function client_input in client.c should help as a quick fix if anyone else is seeing the same thing:

client_send_line(client, AUTH_WAITING_MSG);

Getting back to nginx (if people are still reading) - I'm not all that familiar with imap but I guess that you could safely read data until a line with the correct tag is encountered with running the risk of eating a response from some other command? If I have to maintain an out of tree patch then the one liner for dovecot is looking the better option but I'd rather ask first if this change could be made to nginx since there are surely other similar situations that it would avoid.

regards,

David