[Dovecot] OS X-centricities? Too many files, temp, indexes, etc...

[Dean Blackburn]

Timo Sirainen wrote:
>> 1) Too many files open  - no plimit command on OS X, so I can't figure 
>> out how to increase the max number of open files... Also, are there any 
>> alternative means of CLOSING the files? stopping/restarting dovecot 
>> didn't seem to help;
>>     
>
> Which process is running out of them? There are multiple Dovecot
> processes, and each could have a different reason of running out of file
> handles.
>
>   
dovecot: Mar 24 11:35:51 Error: imap(yukimurashige): pipe() failed: Too 
many open files
dovecot: Mar 24 11:35:51 Error: child 21465 (imap) returned error 89

>> 2) I was running 1.0beta1 last week, and am now on 1.0beta3, but I'm 
>> still not seeing corrupt indexes/other dovecot files rebuilding 
>> themselves. I really can't stick with this solution if I'll always have 
>> to worry about manually fixing broken caches/indexes.
>>     
>
> First of all they shouldn't anymore be corrupting themselves at least
> easily. What exactly are the error messages you're seeing?
>
>   
Lots of this:

dovecot: Mar 24 12:18:45 Error: imap(mikitanaka): Corrupted index file 
/Users/mikitanaka/Maildir/dovecot.index: uid_validity = 0, next_uid = 1366

Some of this:

dovecot: Mar 24 10:55:45 Error: imap(kristinegivas): imap(19936) malloc: 
*** error for object 0x602200: incorrect checksum for freed object - 
object was probably modified after being freed, break at szone_error to 
debug

And occasionally this:

dovecot: Mar 24 11:00:14 Error: imap(deanblackburn): Maildir 
/Users/deanblackburn/Maildir sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox 
(1042 > 1041, file = 1143071249.Ve000008I8e7f3b40.mailserv.local:2,Sk)

That's just yesterday's errors, we've seen some others as well. But they 
all go away if one deletes dovecot* from the affected directory, and 
they don't go away on their own. Also, we'll see a huge number of temp.* 
files build up within the maildir once these files "go bad"...

 From the client perspective, you either get a "connection timed out" 
error, or on some less robust clients, "connection refused by IMAP server".
> Also as far as I know they're rebuilding themselves automatically in
> most situations. Only if Dovecot crashes because of the corruption it
> doesn't get rebuilt. If it's not crashing with you, could it be just
> that they keep re-breaking all the time?
>   
Definitely possible. ;) How can we tell?

If we can solve these issues, we'll be very happy with Dovecot... 
Courier seems a lot more solid, in retrospect, but required so much disk 
access it was completely unusable by our staff. In contrast, Dovecot is 
fast, light on resources, but will break around 5-10 individuals' 
mailboxes every day. So far, we just can't win!

-deano