On 8/24/2009, Emmanuel Seyman (eseyman@edd.fr) wrote:

I'm using Dovecot 1.0.15 on our internal mail server and I'm seeing a high load from one of our users.

Upgrading might help (1.0.15 is old), but there are lots of things that can cause this.

This user uses Thunderbird (with the IMAP protocol) and the load average of the server goes through the roof every once in a while. I'ld like to understand why we're seeing this and whether the blame should be put on Thunderbird or on Dovecot.

Has anyone ever seen this before?

dovecot -n output and logs exhibiting the problem will go a long way to providing an answer.

Obvious possibility: is the user moving/deleting a large number of messages at once?

Again, upgrading is highly recommended (1.2.4 is current stable), but I'd also suggest reading about optimizing at the bottom of this page:

http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailLocation/Maildir

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Best regards,

Charles