[Dovecot] very slow imap opens in pine after moving maildirs to new drive

Dave Lugo dlugo at etherboy.com
Mon Jan 2 19:19:23 EET 2006


Hi,

I've been running dovecot-0.99.10 for the past several years, with
virtually no problems.  Lately, I noticed that the filesystem holding my
users' imap maildirs was getting close to full.  So... last night, I
used tar to copy /var/spool/imap to a new drive (9G scsi, reiserfs) that
I then mounted under /var/spool/imap (after moving the old dir aside).

After the move, what would take pine a handful of seconds, with the load
average barely breaking .40, now takes several minutes, with a load
average spike to nearly 3.

I must admit to being rather puzzled by this, as I would not have
expected the move to result in worse performance.  Do I need to figure
out what the index file names are, and delete those?  Any suggestions
greatly appreciated - as even closing pine now takes nearly 5 minutes,
whereas when dovecot talks to my old imap dir (I've tested this),
closing the session takes no more than 10 seconds.

server is Mandrake 9.1, 2.4.21-0.13mdkenterprise, P4 2.6GHz, 1G RAM 9G
U2W SCSI system disk, 9G U2W SCSI (and big*ss IDE drive for /users).  Each
of the scsi drives is on its own aha-2940UW controller.

Filesystem on old imap location (/var filesystem) is reiserfs, same as
that on new dedicated disk.

Thanks much,

Dave

-- 
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Dave Lugo   dlugo at etherboy.com    LC Unit #260   TINLC
Have you hugged your firewall today?   No spam, thanks.
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