On 2 Feb 2019, at 6.44, Tijl <dovecot@odie.be> wrote:

How can dovecot be run without writing to /var/lib/dovecot/instances everyday? Is there a configuration setting for this?

You'd need to patch src/master/main.c instance_update_now() to remove:

to_instance = timeout_add((3600 * 12 + i_rand_limit(60 * 30)) * 1000,

instance_update_now, list);

I'm not quite sure why I wrote such code to update it continuously.