On 26. Jul 2026, at 0.17, John Fawcett via dovecot <dovecot@dovecot.org> wrote:

...

Hi

having further investigated the timeouts mentioned in the previous thread, I am submitting this patch as a potential solution.

Basically with -A doveadm parameter, the 155 second timeout is applied to the whole end to end transaction. With -F parameter the 155 second >timeout is applied to each single user operation. Changing the logic of -A to follow -F looks a bit invasive. So this patch does more or less the >same thing, i.e. giving each user operation 155 seconds timeout, done in a different way. Whenever another username is returned, the timeout is >reset.

PS I got help from Claude on this.

Some further improvements via Fable - does this still fix your problems?

commit 9deefd88b37d4e9bfecdf6bd1c9fa8a3f9d6b100 Author: Timo Sirainen <timo.sirainen@open-xchange.com> Date: Wed Aug 5 21:33:42 2026 +0000

lib-auth-client: Extend LIST request timeout whenever a username is returned

The auth lookup timeout (155 seconds by default) was applied to the whole LIST request, i.e. the entire user enumeration. With large installations listing all users can easily take longer than that, causing e.g. doveadm -A to fail with "Auth server request timed out".

Reset the request's timeout whenever another username is returned. This turns the timeout into a "no progress for N seconds" stall detector, matching how independent short-lived per-user requests (e.g. as used when iterating -F user files) never accumulate a single deadline across the whole run.

The timeout handling assumes that requests expire in creation order, so extending is only allowed while the request is alone on its connection. This is always the case for LIST, which is asserted at init already.

Timo can you say in which upcoming version this patch will be included?

Oliver