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

[Rick Romero]

On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 19:15 -0400, Patrick A. Treptau wrote:
> 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.

I don't say this lightly - upgrade.  Personally I HATE that answer, I'm
a "If it ain't broke don't fix it" person, but I've seen so many
improvements to the backend and indexing systems this looks like it's an
appropriate answer for you.

Rick