[Dovecot] Rebuilding indexes fails on inconsistent mdbox

[Milan Holzäpfel]

On Wed, 24 Oct 2012 09:01:24 -0500
Stan Hoeppner <stan at hardwarefreak.com> wrote:

> On 10/24/2012 6:28 AM, Milan Holzäpfel wrote:
> 
> > I have a problem with an incosistent mdbox: 
> ...
> > four hours after the problem initially appeared, I did a hard reset of
> > the system because it was unresponsive.
> ...
> > Can anybody say something about this? May the mdbox be repaired? 
> 
> If the box is truly unresponsive, i.e. hard locked, then the corrupted
> indexes are only a symptom of the underlying problem, which is unrelated
> to Dovecot, UNLESS, the lack of responsiveness was due to massive disk
> access, which will occur when rebuilding indexes on a 6.6GB mailbox.
> You need to know the difference so we have accurate information to
> troubleshoot with.

Thanks for your suggestion. I wasn't looking for a solution for the
unresponsiveness, but I failed to make that clear. 

I was not patient enough to debug the unresponsiveness issue. The box
was not hard locked, but any command took very look if it would at all
complete. I think that it could be massive swapping, but I wouldn't
expect Dovecot to be the cause. 

After the reboot, Dovecot would happily re-execute the failing index
rebuild on each new incoming message, which suggests that Dovecot
wasn't the cause for the unresponsiveness. 

> If the there's a kernel or hardware problem, you should see related
> errors in dmesg.  Please share those.

The kernel had messages like

INFO: task cron:2799 blocked for more than 120 seconds.

in the dmesg. But again, I didn't mean to ask for a solution to this
problem. 

Regards,
Milan Holzäpfel


-- 
Milan Holzäpfel <listen at mjh.name>