We're an ISP with approximately 9000 email customers. Up until early
in January our primary mail servers ran on OS X, with exim as the MTA
and courier-imap as the pop/imap server.
We had continual problems with courier on OS X. The load it
generates on the machine is horrible. You'll get absolutely no help
from the courier mailing list or developers with OS X issues.
--
Roger J. Weeks
Systems & Network Administrator
Mendocino Community Network
Message: 2
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 09:22:18 -0800
From: Dean Blackburn <dean.blackburn@viz.com>
Subject: Re: [Dovecot] OS X-centricities? Too many files, temp,
indexes, etc...
To: dovecot@dovecot.org
Message-ID: <44257C4A.6030801@viz.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Timo Sirainen wrote:
- Too many files open - no plimit command on OS X, so I can't
figure
out how to increase the max number of open files... Also, are
there any
alternative means of CLOSING the files? stopping/restarting dovecot
didn't seem to help;
Which process is running out of them? There are multiple Dovecot
processes, and each could have a different reason of running out
of file
handles.
dovecot: Mar 24 11:35:51 Error: imap(yukimurashige): pipe() failed:
Too
many open files
dovecot: Mar 24 11:35:51 Error: child 21465 (imap) returned error 89
- I was running 1.0beta1 last week, and am now on 1.0beta3, but I'm
still not seeing corrupt indexes/other dovecot files rebuilding
themselves. I really can't stick with this solution if I'll
always have
to worry about manually fixing broken caches/indexes.
First of all they shouldn't anymore be corrupting themselves at least
easily. What exactly are the error messages you're seeing?
Lots of this:
dovecot: Mar 24 12:18:45 Error: imap(mikitanaka): Corrupted index file
/Users/mikitanaka/Maildir/dovecot.index: uid_validity = 0, next_uid
= 1366
Some of this:
dovecot: Mar 24 10:55:45 Error: imap(kristinegivas): imap(19936)
malloc:
*** error for object 0x602200: incorrect checksum for freed object -
object was probably modified after being freed, break at
szone_error to
debug
And occasionally this:
dovecot: Mar 24 11:00:14 Error: imap(deanblackburn): Maildir
/Users/deanblackburn/Maildir sync: UID inserted in the middle of
mailbox
(1042 > 1041, file = 1143071249.Ve000008I8e7f3b40.mailserv.local:2,Sk)
That's just yesterday's errors, we've seen some others as well. But
they
all go away if one deletes dovecot* from the affected directory, and
they don't go away on their own. Also, we'll see a huge number of
temp.*
files build up within the maildir once these files "go bad"...
From the client perspective, you either get a "connection timed out"
error, or on some less robust clients, "connection refused by IMAP
server".
Also as far as I know they're rebuilding themselves automatically in
most situations. Only if Dovecot crashes because of the corruption it
doesn't get rebuilt. If it's not crashing with you, could it be just
that they keep re-breaking all the time?
Definitely possible. ;) How can we tell?
If we can solve these issues, we'll be very happy with Dovecot...
Courier seems a lot more solid, in retrospect, but required so much
disk
access it was completely unusable by our staff. In contrast,
Dovecot is
fast, light on resources, but will break around 5-10 individuals'
mailboxes every day. So far, we just can't win!
-deano