[Dovecot] indexer-worker

[Timo Sirainen]

On 28.6.2012, at 13.38, Wojciech Puchar wrote:

>>> 29413 root             1  76    0 22820K  9204K kqread  1   0:17  5.86% indexer-worker
>> 
>> It runs as root while not really doing anything, but when it starts
>> accessing users' files it temporarily drops privileges. This is
>> necessary if users have multiple different UIDs.
> 
> to showed it with root privilege and 60% CPU load+disk I/O when doing text search over not yet indexed folder.

Maybe your ps/kernel shows the process's "real uid" instead of the "effective uid".

>> If you have only one UID e.g. vmail, you could set:
>> 
> i'm not sure what you exactly mean.
> 
> I have simplest possible config - mail accounts are unix accounts and mail is at Maildir

Yes, so the problem is that if the same indexer-worker process wants to index mails to two different users, it can't drop root privileges completely because otherwise it couldn't switch between the users' UIDs.

Anyway, it would be possible to drop the root privileges completely by servicing only a single indexing request and then stopping the process. This would be worse for performance of course, but it should still be an option. I'll probably add to v2.2.