[Dovecot] strange email client problems

[Gabriel Granger]

Hi Timo,

Thanks for your reply,

Closing the email client doesn't kill the process, it does sometimes 
but normally have to wait a while (5mins or more).  When you refer to 
CPU load are you talking about on the server itself? if so I don't 
believe it is.  I will check next time this happens.

  My largest users mailbox file is 200Mb with the total disk space used 
by all their mail folders is 6GB.  Is there any information regarding 
limits on what is a safe maximum size for a mailbox folder?  I try to 
get my users to keep their inboxes under 200 messages or 50Mb.  
Currently I'm gettting my heavy users to reduce their inboxes from 
150Mb down to something sensible.

As for the the version of Dovecot I'm running its 1.0-stable on 
linux(SuSE 9.1, tho I wish it was a debian box) a 1U Intel P4 2.4 1GB 
DDR 2 * SATA 250 Drives running RAID 1.

Regards

Gabe

On 18 Mar 2005, at 18:19, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> On 17.3.2005, at 19:18, Gabriel Granger wrote:
>
>> The users get the "loading message" or "opening messages" and the egg 
>> timer goes round but never completes.  I managed to clear the problem 
>> by getting the user to close their email client and then kill their 
>> IMAP processes on the server, when the user logs in again the client 
>> responds correctly.
>
> You mean just closing the email client didn't kill the imap process on 
> server? Was it using any CPU?
>
>> Is there something I'm doing wrong with the configuration of dovecot? 
>> would using MailDir help, I dont want to migrate from Mailbox unless 
>> this change will make things better, I understand their are benefits 
>> from using MailDir, but I dont know if I will continue to see the 
>> same problems if I migrate.
>
> How large are your largest mailboxes? Maildir probably won't help 
> anyway with these problems.
>
>> Any help or advise would be great, I should add that everyone is 
>> connecting to the server over SSL
>
> But you didn't say what Dovecot version you were using. Most 
> importantly, 0.99.x or 1.0-stable/test?