[Dovecot] index file vs. memory

[Willem Riede]

On 02/22/2006 03:02:27 AM, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> 
> Yes, this isn't unexpected since I'm also seeing the heap grow  
> slowly. But since it's grown only 1.5MB in 30 hours (to 3MB), that  
> isn't too bad of a problem.
> 
> Could you try running imap with some memory leak detection tool/ 
> library, such as Valgrind or dmalloc? I know I should try that myself  
> also..

Even though from another mail in this thread I learned that you found some 
leak(s) already, today I had the time to run valgrind on Dovecot imap.

It made dovecot pretty slow, and my mail client (balsa) didn't like it much 
(mostly disconnecting for timeout). In fact, at one point it crashed because 
it had received a block of garbage data - this was the trace leading up to it:

IMAP mailbox: imap://wriede@athena.riede.org/Root
IMAP C: DONE
IMAP C: b2 NOOP
IMAP S: 0 OK Idle completed.
IMAP S: b2 OK NOOP completed.
IMAP mailbox: imap://wriede@athena.riede.org/RNW
IMAP C: b3 NOOP
IMAP S: <about 1K of utter unprintable garbage>imap connection severed.

I can't tell whether the sending or the receiving end is to blame, but given 
that server and client are on the same PC, it is not likely to be a transmission 
error. But I digress.

I opened a bunch of mailboxes, read some mail, did a couple of searches.

Valgrind found many leaked blocks in each invocation of imap. The typical 
range of leaked memory is from several hundred bytes to 100K, but one process 
stood out:

==4353==    definitely lost: 18,463,192 bytes in 18,029 blocks.

I'm sending the log files seperately to Timo, as loading everybody's inbox 
with that is not appropriate.

Regards, Willem Riede.