[Dovecot] Maildir unreliability

[Dan Stromberg]

On Mon, 2004-10-25 at 06:44, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On 25.10.2004, at 11:04, Peter Evans wrote:
> 
> > Are you sure its maildir that is the issue, I am sure God Emperor DJB
> > would have issues with any such statement maligning the holy grail.
> >
> > The issue looks to me like it is attribute caching, and thus not 
> > actually
> > specific to Maildir, just aggravated by it.
> 
> Well, it's not maildir issue itself, but maildir more or less relies on 
> readdir() not losing renamed files. I'm not sure what you mean by 
> attribute caching, because it's not just with NFS.
> 
> I'm sure if you point that out to DJB he just says it's not a real 
> problem, because it doesn't happen hardly ever except with some stress 
> test tools, or mailboxes with _many_ simultaneous users. Or maybe with 
> a heavily loaded server. Or ...
> 
> In any case, I'd rather make Dovecot resistant to this problem entirely 
> rather than hope that everyone uses maildirs only in optimal 
> conditions.

Suggest looking over procmail's empirical approach to optimizing NFS
locking.

Ideal might be to have the locking style cached in some file under
$PREFIX/var, make dovecot inspect that file when deciding how to do
locking, and have an option to dovecot that will redetermine the best
style.

It'd make a superb library, since so many apps need to do this.

-- 
Dan Stromberg DCS/NACS/UCI <strombrg at dcs.nac.uci.edu>

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