On Nov 12, 2008, at 12:34 AM, Steven F Siirila wrote:
We are running into a situation where Dovecot master is simply trying to do too much. It some situations, we are finding that there are times in which it cannot service requests. Restarting Dovecot seems to help in these situations, possibly due to the fact that it no
longer has to manage its THOUSANDS of file descriptors for pipes to the many imap/proxy processes that it uses for logging. Is there a way to turn off logging through the master process (in exchange for lesser
security)? If not, would it be easy to have the master process do its logging
using separate threads (which would help on some modern hardware)? Finally, would it be easy to delegate the task of logging to a dedicated
process?
I was planning on using separate logger processes with v2.0. For now I
guess you could make imap/pop3 processes log directly by changing
mail_executable to a script that:
- Unsets LOG_TO_MASTER environment
- Sets USE_SYSLOG environment
- Closes file descriptor 2 (stderr). I'm not actually sure if you can
do this using a shell script, might need to use something else. - Executes the imap/pop3 binary.
http://wiki.dovecot.org/PostLoginScripting tells a bit more about
using mail_executable.