Hello Timo,
I'm running
dovecot-1.0.rc15 (imap and pop) postfix-2.3.5,1 procmail-3.22_6 (which is my LDA)
on FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE
I'm still using the mbox format (I'm planning to migrate to Maildir soon), mailboxes are on an NFS filesystem.
I regulary see stale dotlocks files (either from dovecot (29 bytes, hold the pid of the process) or procmail (1 byte) and processes stucked in Disk Wait state.
The only way I can get ridd of them is to
restart nfslocking
remove the .lock file
change the inode of the mailbox filelocking strategies are
fcntl for mbox_read in dovecot
dotlock fcntl for mbox_write in dovecot
dotlock fcntl for procmailso I can't figure out why I see such stale locks and processes.
Note : I disabled nfs attribute caching so I avoid cache related issues (such as a dotlock showing up late, etc...)
Besides, I often see several imap-login processes for the same remote IP address. Does it means the user has several instances of his UA running or is it the behavior of some UA (Eudora ? Thunderbird ?) even if only one instance is run by the user. In any case, wouldn't that be dead-lock/stale lock prone ?
-- Thomas Hummel | Institut Pasteur hummel@pasteur.fr | Pôle informatique - systèmes et réseau