[Dovecot] Stale NFS file handle and duplicated messages

[Timo Sirainen]

On Sat, 2007-12-08 at 11:29 +0000, Adrian Barker wrote:
> >> Nov 29 00:49:47 imap-e.ucl.ac.uk dovecot: [ID 107833 mail.error]
> >> IMAP(ccaazzz): close() failed with index
> >>  file /home/ccaazzz/imap-mail/.imap/mbox/dovecot.index: Stale NFS file
> >> handle
..
> Thanks for replying. I have read the wiki page on using NFS. In general,
> our users should only be accessing a single IMAP server at any one time
> - we have a hardware load-balancer in front of the IMAP servers, but it
> is possible that some have IMAP clients on multiple machines that are
> left running. This can be checked from the logs. 

The "Stale NFS file handle" means that another server had deleted the
file while this server was still trying to read/write it. So every time
it happens there must have been two servers accessing the mailbox at the
same time.

> Would keeping the index
> files locally on the IMAP servers have an impact on performance ?

If users are usually sent to the same server, it should only improve the
performance. If users are randomly sent to different servers then the
indexes will have to be updated in multiple servers, which probably
makes the performance worse.

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