On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 12:47:25AM +0800, Uwe Dippel wrote: > ... when a user has close to 20.000 mails in the Inbox. > It chucks out courier-imap when more processes are involved than allowed: > (This is after some 3 hours of increasing load, searching around 1 GB in > cur: > > load averages: 84.11, 83.12, 80.77 21:04:01 > 10218 udippel -14 0 3504K 4336K sleep inode 0:00 0.88% imapd > 5550 udippel -5 0 3372K 1972K sleep getblk 1:31 0.15% imapd > 2566 udippel -14 0 3368K 2080K sleep inode 0:54 0.15% imapd > 2623 udippel -14 0 3296K 1892K sleep inode 0:49 0.15% imapd > 25935 udippel -5 0 3504K 1872K sleep getblk 0:47 0.15% imapd > 21550 udippel -14 0 3356K 1816K sleep inode 0:27 0.15% imapd > 30191 udippel -14 0 3256K 1944K sleep inode 0:24 0.15% imapd > 14507 udippel -14 0 3284K 2080K sleep inode 0:54 0.10% imapd > 28879 udippel -5 0 3416K 1976K sleep getblk 0:46 0.10% imapd > 21472 udippel -14 0 3368K 1972K sleep inode 1:15 0.05% imapd > 8937 udippel -5 0 3404K 1792K sleep getblk 0:48 0.05% imapd > 20352 udippel -14 0 3492K 1940K sleep inode 0:15 0.05% imapd > 11819 udippel -14 0 3268K 1956K sleep inode 0:14 0.05% imapd > 15284 udippel -14 0 3384K 1820K sleep inode 1:38 0.00% imapd > 21101 udippel -14 0 3320K 1892K sleep inode 1:34 0.00% imapd > [,,,] > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > A moment later the thing is done: > > Mon Jun 30 21:09:35 SGT 2008 > /bin/ksh: cannot fork - try again > > I wrote to the courier-imap list, and Sam Varshavchik wrote: > > "imapd does not fork any processes. There is always a single process for > each > login (and a second, if encryption is used). " > > I assume Sam knows. But why does OpenBSD fork like rabbits when a user > searches 'Entire Message' in a large mailbox? > > Uwe
We had a similar problem on our mailserver and thunderbird as mail client. Basicly, thunderbird has a certain timeout value for searches. If thunderbird doesn't get a result for a search after <timeout> seconds, it assumes some error and requests the search again. new search -> new fork -> more load and so on. Other MUAs may have similar settings. Solution: Search and set the timeout value in thunderbird's config editor (IRC mailnews.tcptimeout, defaults to 60) Use smaller inboxes Get more iron:) Alf
