On 10/24/2012 9:45 AM, Charles Marcus wrote:
On 2012-10-24 10:01 AM, Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com> wrote:
If the box is truly unresponsive, i.e. hard locked, then the corrupted indexes are only a symptom of the underlying problem, which is unrelated to Dovecot, UNLESS, the lack of responsiveness was due to massive disk access, which will occur when rebuilding indexes on a 6.6GB mailbox. You need to know the difference so we have accurate information to troubleshoot with.
Hmmm... I wonder would it be possible for dovecot to automatically lower the 'niceness' for index rebuilds (on systems that support such) to avoid causing such distress?
Changing the process priority would not help. Indexing a large mailbox is an IO bound, not a compute bound, operation. With Linux, changing from the CFQ to deadline scheduler may help some with low responsiveness. But the only real solution for such a case where iowait is bringing the system to its knees is to acquire storage with far greater IOPS and concurrent IO capability. I.e. a server.
-- Stan