[Dovecot] Index corruption causes child process to die

[Timo Sirainen]

On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 17:45 +0100, Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:
> Timo Sirainen wrote:
> 
> > mmap_disable=yes does quite a many things differently than
> > mmap_disable=no, so I guess it could just be a bug somewhere in the =no
> > codepath.
> > 
> > Daniel, how about you? Does mmap_disable=yes fix it for you? And what
> > error messages exactly do you get?
> 
> Hi.
> 
> It's hard for me to tell, because the problem is intermittent, and I can't
> make it appear on my test rig / development platform. 
> 
> And when set mmap_disable=yes the load goes through the roof on the 
> production servers, and they quickly become unresponsive, so I have to 
> set it back to mmap_disable=yes. 

"back to mmap_disable=no" I guess? They shouldn't affect load that much,
mmap_disable should just use somewhat more memory and CPU.

> Nov  7 17:10:53 famine dovecot: IMAP(account-name): Corrupted index file /var/shemail/maildirs/site/user/.folder/dovecot.index: Duplicate header extension keywords
> 
> This only happens for Thunderbird IMAP users as far as I can tell. The 
> client then loses connection with the server after a timeout that can last
> for a minute or two. 

That error message should only cause index file to be rebuilt. I'm not
sure if it gives an error message or if it kills the connection
immediately, but it really shouldn't just hang the connection.

> After reconnecting, duplicates of some messages will sometimes appear, and
> some times new messages will be sorted at the top of Thunderbird's list.

Also that error message doesn't have anything to do with creation of
duplicate messages.

> In the maildir, these duplicate messages are hardlinks of the same file.

Do you have maildir_copy_with_hardlinks=yes? If yes, it sounds like the
client is copying messages into the mailbox itself (or possibly copy to
Trash and back to inbox). If it's set to no, then I don't think it's
Dovecot creating those files at all.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20061107/15a8c335/attachment-0001.pgp