From: Timo Sirainen <t...@iki.fi>
Subject: Re: [Dovecot] IO rate quotas?
So a single process that is reading files fast enough from disk can
cause disk IO to spike in a way that makes all other processes wait for
available disk IO?
It's not a single process.
Thunderbird's newest defaults are to syncronize every folder and it will
open one connectrion per folder in order to do that.
Appropriate disk/swappiness/readahead/cache tuning is required - along
with enough ram to cope with several users trying this at once.
The underlaying filesystem is also important. as a for-instance, this
kind of load with maildir format will effectively _kill_ a GFS box.
Our fix was to install systemwide defaults on managed systems to not
synchronize (not needed, the home directories are on network storage
anyway) and to ask people to check/unset this on laptops/etc
