On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 19:15 -0400, Patrick A. Treptau wrote:
Hello,
we're experiencing an odd issue after combining two vDisks used for mail storage into one big new LVM. We've done this in the past successfully and didn't experience a lot of problems. We stopped all services (dovecot/postfix) to ensure that mailbox contents (Maildir) will not be changed, rsynch'ed the mail to the new disks and restarted everything.
When we restarted dovecot, we noticed a huge spike in load (average load in top and high cpu iowait) and isolated dovecot as the issue. At some point, the average load crept up to over 100 and crashed the server twice. However, over time the average load and cpu wait times went down slightly. I have noticed a spike in load after moving user's mail storage, but not like this. It almost looks like everyone is either re-indexing or re-caching their mail?
Any help would be appreciated. We're on dovecot 0.99.
I don't say this lightly - upgrade. Personally I HATE that answer, I'm a "If it ain't broke don't fix it" person, but I've seen so many improvements to the backend and indexing systems this looks like it's an appropriate answer for you.
Rick