(Ccing again the list in case someone else has similar problems)

On Sun, 2007-06-17 at 20:14 +0200, Lucas -LandM- wrote:

Hi Timo,

I patched the source and same result. We think the problem is because everytime user access to his mailbox, dovecot do the index again. And it consume near the 80% in iowait because, as strace shows, read all mails.

The problem isn't that Dovecot indexes it. The problem is that Dovecot ISN'T indexing it.

Dovecot commits changes to cache file only after a FETCH command finished successfully. So if the client is disconnected in the middle of doing the FETCH, all of the work that Dovecot did so far gets lost on Dovecot's side. And apparently your client also starts everything from the beginning, even though it already knew some of the messages' sizes..

So the previous patch I sent was supposed to prevent this because originally Dovecot was the one that disconnected the client. It logged "Disconnected for inactivity in reading our output" as the disconnect reason. This shouldn't happen anymore after you patched it, so why did the client still get disconnected?

Anyway, here's another patch that makes Dovecot not forget all of its work if the client gets disconnected in the middle of FETCH: http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-1.0/rev/e1cd11c5e00a

If the client is still disconnecting, it probably takes a couple of tries to get everything read and cached, but after that it should all work nicely.

Here's a similar patch for POP3: http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-1.0/rev/86766f448e50