[Dovecot] High load/corrupted indexes after moving mailboxes?

[Patrick A. Treptau]

Hello,

we're experiencing an odd issue after combining two vDisks used for mail
storage into one big new LVM. We've done this in the past successfully and
didn't experience a lot of problems. We
stopped all services (dovecot/postfix) to ensure that mailbox contents
(Maildir)
will not be changed, rsynch'ed the mail to the new disks and restarted
everything.

When we restarted dovecot, we noticed a huge spike in load (average load
in top and
high cpu iowait) and isolated dovecot as the issue. At some point, the
average load
crept up to over 100 and crashed the server twice. However, over time the
average
load and cpu wait times went down slightly. I have noticed a spike in load
after moving
user's mail storage, but not like this. It almost looks like everyone is
either
re-indexing or re-caching their mail?

Any help would be appreciated. We're on dovecot 0.99.

-Pat