On Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 02:34:33AM +0200, Timo Sirainen wrote:
I'm beginning to understand the problem. Or at least one of them. :)
Dovecot is currently flushing attribute cache for files it wants to stat/open. But that's not enough. It also has to flush attribute cache for the directory, or it might stat/open a file that has already been unlinked (but which still has links somewhere in the filesystem so that it doesn't fail with ESTALE).
dotlock_use_excl=yes seems to help somewhat with this problem for now. It also gives better performance.
I'm assuming that only helps if I use dotlock locking, right? I've left it at the default locking method so far except for a brief period a few nights ago, when I tried dotlock but it seemed no better (although I neglected to try dotlock_use_excl).