[Dovecot] Something other than dotlock for uidlist locking?

[Dean Blackburn]

Yes, please! Our users are absolutely dying here... Since this problem 
didn't crop up until we were 90% moved onto Dovecot, we've now got ~100 
users who have constant timeouts/locking issues/stale lock files/etc 
under OS X... Reboots help a very* small amount, but ideally we'd like 
to have a clean version of dovecot (using beta8 now, too scared to 
update to rc2) that doesn't need rebooting (though, due to this debacle, 
we have been migrating to another mail platform entirely - still, 
anything that improves performance will help with our move, as well).

Thanks,

-deano


James Berry wrote:
> Hi Timo, (By the way, this seems to relate to a performance issue on 
> Mac OS X with HFS+).
>
> On Aug 28, 2005, at 12:30 PM, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>> On Thu, 2005-08-25 at 10:26 -0700, James Berry wrote:
>>> If I read the code correctly, only dotlocks are supported for locking
>>> of dovecot-uidlist. And I don't see any settings in the config file
>>> for it.
>>>
>>> As it turns out, dotlocks are very slow on my system, due to their
>>> implementation via hardlinks.
>>>
>>> Would it be possible to support other locking mechanisms for locking
>>> of the uidlist file?
>>
>> They are locked only when they are modified, and the modification works
>> by creating a new file and renaming it over the dovecot-uidlist file.
>>
>> Is it only hardlinks that are problematic? It shouldn't be too difficult
>> to change the dotlock code to rely on working O_EXCL instead of
>> hardlinks.
>>
>> Hmm. Actually I just did that in CVS. I guess I should also put out some
>> setting to enable it in config file. For now you could just change this:
>>
>>     ret = set->use_excl_lock ?
>>         try_create_lock_excl(&lock_info, write_pid) :
>>         try_create_lock_hardlink(&lock_info, write_pid);
>>
>> to
>>
>>     ret = try_create_lock_excl(&lock_info, write_pid);
>>
>> and see if it works faster.
>>
>
> Well, a year later I finally got around to trying this out. On a Mac 
> system. And guess what? It seems much, much snappier. Sorry about the 
> delay in testing it. One of the symptoms I've been seeing on the 
> server is that performance gradually degrades over time, even if 
> dovecot is restarted. The problem seems better after a server restart, 
> which clears out an area on disk which tracks unlinked and hardlinked 
> files. I believe this option will fix that performance issue.
>
> Any chance of getting a configuration option for this?
>
> James