[Dovecot] Degeneration of CPU Performance

Thiago Monaco Papageorgiou thiago.monaco at corp.terra.com.br
Fri May 8 22:00:26 EEST 2009


Hi Curtis, thanks for your replies.  below my replies:

Curtis Maloney wrote:
>
> Are your using leaving mail on the server?  If not, you may find it 
> advantageous to disable the indexing, since it's of no real use for 
> "drive by collect" mail.
Yes, we have some users that leave the messages in the server (webmail 
users) and we have users that download messages to local clients defore 
erase it.
>
>
> This, to me, is consistent with Dovecot spending a lot of time 
> indexing the overnight deliveries as everyone logs on in the morning.
>
> Are you using dovecot deliver as your LDA?
We don't use dovecot LDA solution.

>
>
> As I said above, if your users are using this service ONLY to collect 
> mail, not to store it, then the indexes Dovecot tries to maintain are 
> a waste of effort.
>
> You can read more about POP3 configuration in the wiki at: 
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/POP3Server
>
> The MailLocation page also has some notes about index file placement, 
> including:
>
> """
> If you really want to, you can also disable the index files completely 
> by appending :INDEX=MEMORY.
> """
We are already doing it. All our mailboxes were renamed with this string 
appended. We already tried use index  and not use it, use cache and not 
use cache also, but this performance degeneration still happening.

We have no relevant issue about memory, I/O, network consumption. 
Everything seems to be fine (we have monitoring it and more things).

We don't care if dovecot use more CPU than our current solution, dovecot 
is more reliable and secure. The problem is this performance getting 
worse every day. We can't restart dovecot each 2 days because it is 
consuming too much CPU.

Thanks again for the help.

-- 
Thiago Monaco Papageorgiou <thiago.monaco at corp.terra.com.br>
________________________
Terra Networks Brasil S/A 
Tel: +55 (51) 3284-4274



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