[Dovecot] locking problem

[Timo Sirainen]

On 1.2.2012, at 22.43, myron wrote:

>>> dovecot: IMAP(<user>): Timeout while waiting for lock for transaction log file /users/<user>/mail/.imap/INBOX/dovecot.index.log
>> How large is the /var/mail/<user> mbox file?
> 
> 
> -rw------- 1 <user> mail 15M 2012-02-01 14:46 /var/mail/<user>

OK, so not very big.

> Can I just zero out the 3 files in that directory.
> 
> 6240 Jan 31 13:26 dovecot.index
> 165888 Jan 31 14:39 dovecot.index.cache
> 25100 Jan 31 14:42 dovecot.index.log

You can delete them, but somehow I doubt that helps.. That error message anyway happens when a session has opened the mbox and is "syncing" it. This normally is a pretty fast operation, but the error message indicates that another session saw the first session doing it for over 3 minutes until it aborted.

Do you have hanging imap processes eating 100% CPU? That could explain it if Dovecot doesn't like something in the mbox file. Also there may have been some other reasons for this that are already fixed in newer versions.