[Dovecot] Limiting the size of index files
Is there a way to limit the amount of disc space dovecot will use for its index cache? Other than putting that on a separate partition, I mean.
We host our mail data on the file server, however, the index files are located on local discs on each of the mail servers and seem to grow without bounds. We're above 250M now and soon /var will run out of space.
Thanks for any help.
On 14.11.2007, at 11.33, Edgar Fuß wrote:
Is there a way to limit the amount of disc space dovecot will use
for its index cache? Other than putting that on a separate
partition, I mean.We host our mail data on the file server, however, the index files
are located on local discs on each of the mail servers and seem to
grow without bounds. We're above 250M now and soon /var will run
out of space.
You could always just delete some of them manually. I guess it would
be possible to make it drop data more aggressively. I'll add in my TODO.
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On Wed, 14 Nov 2007, Timo Sirainen wrote:
You could always just delete some of them manually. I guess it would be possible to make it drop data more aggressively. I'll add in my TODO.
http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir "Dovecot stores keywords in the maildir filename's flags field using letters a..z. This means that only 26 keywords are possible to store in the maildir. If more are used, they're still stored in Dovecot's index files."
To "just delete" index files may mean that information is lost, too. I don't remember if there are data storred in the index files only.
Wouldn't it better to make index files just that "index files", and move other information into "control" files? You've designed Dovecot to have separate index and control files already.
Bye,
Steffen Kaiser -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
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On 15.11.2007, at 9.24, Steffen Kaiser wrote:
You could always just delete some of them manually. I guess it
would be possible to make it drop data more aggressively. I'll add
in my TODO.http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir "Dovecot stores keywords in the maildir filename's flags field
using letters a..z. This means that only 26 keywords are possible
to store in the maildir. If more are used, they're still stored in
Dovecot's index files."To "just delete" index files may mean that information is lost, too. I don't remember if there are data storred in the index files only.
Wouldn't it better to make index files just that "index files", and
move other information into "control" files? You've designed
Dovecot to have separate index and control files already.
That was the plan, Maildir keywords are the only exception. I was
also thinking about changing that some day so that it's not possible
to set more than 26 keywords with maildir. I think this is currently
pretty much a nonissue because keyword support is pretty bad with
most IMAP clients and no-one has more than maybe 10 different keywords.
Anyway, by "just delete them" I meant dovecot.index.cache files, not
the others. :)
Greetings -
On 15 Nov 2007, at 07:36, Timo Sirainen wrote:
That was the plan, Maildir keywords are the only exception. I was
also thinking about changing that some day so that it's not possible
to set more than 26 keywords with maildir. I think this is currently
pretty much a nonissue because keyword support is pretty bad with
most IMAP clients and no-one has more than maybe 10 different
keywords.Anyway, by "just delete them" I meant dovecot.index.cache files, not
the others. :)
Eeep! Can I just check that I'm not doing something silly? ...
Our mail layout is as follows (using user "abc1" as an example):
/mailstore/messages/a/abc1 ... Mail files in Maildir format /mailstore/control/a/abc1 ... Control files /mailstore/index/a/abc1 ... Index cache files
The first two are NFS-mounted; the last is on local disk.
Our load balancers direct people to their "preferred" host, failing
over to another server if need be. This means that when someone's
preferred server is down for maintenance they can still access their
mail, but end up getting index/cache files created on a "non-
preferred" server.
Obviously these need cleaning up from time to time...
So we are currently using a housekeeping job (tmpreaper) to delete
anything in or below a user's index directory that hasn't been
accessed for 90 days.
I had thought I had read this was safe to do: that the index and
caches files would be (re)built from the Maildir files if need be.
But from what I read above, is it actually only safe to delete the
dovecot.index.cache files? That the index.cache files have to be left
in place to avoid data loss?
Or am I worrying unnecessarily: that it would only affect people using
more than 26 keywords? (Rare)
Cheers, Mike B-)
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participants (4)
-
Edgar Fuß
-
Mike Brudenell
-
Steffen Kaiser
-
Timo Sirainen