- dovecot - dovecot.org

[Dovecot] Speed and memory probs writing large Maildir
by Robin Whittle 14 Jun '03

14 Jun '03

I have Dovecot 0.99.9.1 compiled from the source, without SSL, running on a Red Hat 9.0 system - EXT3 file system, Pentium Pro 233 MHz, Intel motherboard, 128M RAM, IBM 40Gig 7200 RPM HD. I find reading and searching to be nice and fast, and comparing it with Courier IMAP on a Celeron 824 MHz, I think Dovecot is generally not much slower, which means it may well be faster than Courier in some or many ways if it was running on the same machine. My only problem is when writing mailboxes with large numbers of messages. I use Mailir - the same arrangement as Courier IMAP. (I also find that Netscape 4.77 can't use mailboxes which are subfolders of others, but that is probably a Netscape config problem.) I am using Netscape 4.77 (Windows 2000 1.3 GHz Celeron, via 100Mbps switched Ethernet to the Linux machines) to do these tests since I find Netscape 7.02 to be much slower. Netscape 7.02 seems to want to resynch its notion of the mailbox repeatedly as it is writing to it. Without looking at the IMAP traffic (I don't know how) I would say that Netscape 4.77 is not doing this at all. Indeed, after the write, looking at the mailbox causes Netscape 4.77 to read the headers from the IMAP server - so I feel sure that its way of writing the messages is purely "write". Writing a mailbox with a small number of large messages, such as 20 x 100k messages is fine. There is no obvious speed problem or excessive memory use. When writing 2000 x 1k messages, it is totally different. Here are some times for writing from a Netscape 4.77 local mailbox to Dovecot and to Courier IMAP. Message Total Time CPU max Memory RSS size number size Seconds Approx Megs - max Dovecot 100k 100 10M 23 15% ~2 100k 20 2M ~5 ? 1.2 10k 200 2M 20 15% 4 ! 1k 2000 2M 230 60 32 !!!! Courier IMAP 100k 100 10M 14 5% ~1 100k 20 2M ~2 ? ? 10k 200 2M 9 5% ~0.6 1k 2000 2M 88 2% ~0.6 This 2000 message test is small compared to some of the mailboxes I have. I used a real-live mailbox, 6878 messages - 44 Megabytes in a single Mbox for a more demanding test. Using Netscape 4.77 to copy this to a Dovecot Maildir took a very long time - over 30 minutes. The process was fast at first and got slower and slower. As the number of messages in the destination Maildir increased, the memory usage went up and the speed reduced. It seems that RSS memory usage (as reported by "top -d 0.3" hit some kind of limit at about 49 Megs after 4000 messages and then went down a little to about 48 or less. CPU usage was 30 to 82%, fluctuating according to the moment top looked. At the end, I think it was only writing 1.5 messages a second. RSS is the "total amount of physical memory used by the task". The "SIZE" was even bigger - "code plus data plus stack". This got up to 114 Megs by the end of the writing process! After the write had finished, I made Netscape 4.77 view the destination mailbox. This caused Dovecot to send it all the headers, and again Dovecot had these huge memory usage figures. It seemed to read the mailbox at a decent speed - 20 seconds or so. But if I made Dovecot look at another mailbox, and then again at this big target mailbox (say with another client - Netscape 7), it would read the big mailbox at Dovecot's usual high speed - without the high memory usage and I think without high CPU usage as well. Without knowing anything about how Dovecot works, I imagine that there is some kind of caching algorithm for writes, and that this is retained until Dovecot (or at least the instance serving this client) is asked to look at another Maildir. It seems that reading is not slowed by this process much or at all - but writing gets progressively slower as the cache gets bigger. The memory usage - even 49 Megs for RSS - seems excessive. It reached that about halfway through writing the mailbox, so the entire message contents at that state would have been about 22 Megs. But the "SIZE" memory usage is even larger - perhaps limited by the available RAM. This slow speed for writing Maildirs with large numbers of messages is currently a barrier to me using Dovecot. I am about to go back and try again to get Courier IMAP to do what I want . . . The Courier IMAP documentation and what I regard as the difficult "configure -> build -> install -> wonder why it doesn't run" process has cost me so much time that I would be very happy to use something simpler and easier (for me, at least) to install. Thanks for developing this new IMAP server! - Robin

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[Dovecot] DRAC support?
by Charlie Allom 14 Jun '03

14 Jun '03

Hi, I was hoping someone had a quick and dirty (is there any other kind) of patch for DRAC support for dovecot. This daemon is very slick, and I wish to replace my complex courier-imap setup. Regards, C. -- charlie(a)rubberduck.com - Melbourne, Australia http://rubberduck.com/~yeled/ PGP: 0x14AA7941 || finger yeled(a)lazy.spodder.com > http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3266D499.342E%40student.uq.edu.au <

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[Dovecot] --enable-debug bug?
by Gasha 14 Jun '03

14 Jun '03

Hello all, when i'm bulding rpm with --enable-debug get this: I tried 2 different versions 0.99.8 and 0.99.9. Jun 2 20:41:14 mezgls dovecot: Dovecot starting up Jun 2 20:41:15 mezgls dovecot: child 9409 (login) killed with signal 11 Jun 2 20:41:15 mezgls dovecot: child 9408 (login) killed with signal 11 Jun 2 20:41:15 mezgls dovecot: child 9407 (login) killed with signal 11 Jun 2 20:41:15 mezgls dovecot: child 9406 (auth) killed with signal 11 Jun 2 20:41:15 mezgls dovecot: Login process died too early - shutting down Gasha

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[Dovecot] squirrelmail setup
by Gasha 14 Jun '03

14 Jun '03

Hi all, My setup: INBOX -> /var/spool/mail/user directories -> /home/user/Maildir it works with Netscape, but squirrel mail shows only subfolder content. nothing in INBOX. any ideas? Gasha

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[Dovecot] Dovecot configuration with passwd-file
by Spectron International, Inc. 14 Jun '03

14 Jun '03

I have tried to configure dovecot to use passwd-file authentication and I havent been able to. I changed the following in the dovecot.conf file (I want to have all the mailboxes in one directory): default_mail_env = maildir:/opt/mail/%u auth_userdb = passwd-file /etc/passwd.imap auth_passdb = passwd-file /etc/passwd.imap auth_verbose = yes It gives me the following error (I hoped it would be more verbose than this): Internal login failure: f_rojas [192.168.10.4]. passwd.imap exists, the user and password are ok What am I missing? Fawzib Rojas

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[Dovecot] Debian and dovecot
by Spectron International, Inc. 14 Jun '03

14 Jun '03

I have Debian 3.0 (woody) and installed the dovecot packages and it works ok with the default configuration. I want to change the default configuration, is any of this possible? a) I don't want to create accounts for each user, can I have a mailboxes directory with the mailboxes of all the users? They are not many (10-15). b) The authentication right now is done through PAM, the pam.d/dovecot file is: auth required pam_unix_auth.so account required pam_unix_acct.so password required pam_unix_passwd.so session required pam_unix_session.so I want to authenticate against an SMB server, I added the following /etc/pam_smb.conf: SPECTRON-MSIM MAIN MAIN # documentation says I need 2 servers (only have one, is this ok) and changed the pam.d/dovecot to: auth required pam_smb_auth.so account required pam_smb_auth.so # there is no pam_smb_acct password required pam_smb_auth.so # there is no pam_smb_passwd session required pam_smb_auth.so # there is no pam_smb_session and it doesn't work. I obviously did something wrong, but don't know what, and I found nothing that could help me on google. I have samba installed and it works so It's PAM that I'm configuring incorrectly. Hope someone here can help me. Fawzib Rojas

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[Dovecot] Quotas once again
by Mike Machado 14 Jun '03

14 Jun '03

Its been a while since I tried dovecot on my mail server where I have quota issues. I am using mbox file format. There still seems to be a quota problem. I have only /var with quotas and basedir is under /usr (not quotaed). default_mail_env = mbox:~/mail/:INBOX=/var/mail/%u. I tried with mbox_locks = dotlock fcntl (1st set of logs below) and with mbox_locks = fcntl (2nd set of logs) dotlock: Jun 12 17:02:49 newrook pop3(mike): open(/var/mail/mike.lock) failed: Disk quota exceeded Jun 12 17:02:49 newrook pop3(mike): file_lock_dotlock() failed with mbox file /var/mail/mike: Disk quota exceeded Jun 12 17:02:49 newrook pop3(mike): open(/var/mail/mike.lock) failed: Disk quota exceeded Jun 12 17:02:49 newrook pop3(mike): file_lock_dotlock() failed with mbox file /var/mail/mike: Disk quota exceeded Jun 12 17:02:49 newrook pop3: I/O leak: 0x8050930 (0) Jun 12 17:02:49 newrook pop3: I/O leak: 0x807baac (1) fcntl: Jun 12 16:45:32 newrook pop3-login: Login: mike [127.0.0.1] Jun 12 16:45:33 newrook pop3(mike): file_set_size() failed with mbox file /var/mail/mike: Disk quota exceeded Jun 12 16:45:33 newrook pop3(mike): file_set_size() failed with mbox file /var/mail/mike: Disk quota exceeded Jun 12 16:45:33 newrook pop3: I/O leak: 0x8073a2c (1) Jun 12 16:45:33 newrook pop3: I/O leak: 0x804a470 (0) I am using the latest CVS (as of 5 minutes ago). Wasn't this supposed to be working? Have I missed something? My sole goal is to allow people to delete mail when they are out of disk space. -- Mike Machado mike(a)innercite.com InnerCite Inc. Engineering Director / CTO

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[Dovecot] trouble with ssl
by tom hensel 13 Jun '03

13 Jun '03

hi list, first of all, many thanks to the developers of dovecot for this great piece of software! i'm running dovecot 0.99.9.1 on netbsd-current - runs very fine until i try to use sylpheed from my client to connect via ssl: --snip-- Jun 13 08:48:32 devbox imap-login: SSL_accept() failed: error:1408F455:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_RECORD:decryption failed or bad record mac [192.168.100.88] Jun 13 08:48:32 devbox imap-login: Disconnected [192.168.100.8 --snip-- doesn't say much to me... thanks for any help, TOM

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Re: [Dovecot] when/where to set MAIL env variable?
by Mike Brown 12 Jun '03

12 Jun '03

Andrew Basterfield wrote (in a msg I don't think made it to the list): > In dovecot.conf > > default_mail_env = maildir:~/Maildir Ah, silly me... default_mail_env = mbox:~/Mailbox works wonderfully, and is easier than trying to figure out where the MAIL environment variable actually comes into play. Thanks...

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[Dovecot] when/where to set MAIL env variable?
by Mike Brown 12 Jun '03

12 Jun '03

I am trying to get dovecot to work on a system that uses qmail as its MTA. As is typical on such systems, the user's primary inbox is an mbox file called Mailbox, in their home directory. Global shell config files /etc/csh.cshrc and /etc/profile set the MAIL environment variable to ~/Mailbox for the users, which is enough to satisfy their interactive mail clients such as pine, mutt, and elm. The mail-storages.txt file in the dovecot docs seems to say that dovecot will not have a problem with this kind of setup. However, I can't figure out how to make it work. The MAIL variable is only set for users who are using shells like tcsh, bash, etc. The server apparently does not operate in a shell, so it is looking in some other location, perhaps /var/mail/$USER, so everyone's INBOX appears to be empty. It would help if mail-storages.txt, when referring to environment variables such as MAIL, would clarify *whose* environment variables are being referred to. Is it the environment of the user who built dovecot? Is it the environment of the user running the main dovecot process? Is it the environment of the user who is checking their mail / the user that dovecot runs setuid as? When and where do I set the MAIL variable so that dovecot will see it? Or is there some other problem? Any help appreciated...

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