At 9:42 AM -0500 10/18/00, mike miller wrote:
> I have a redhat 5.2 box with qpopper 3.0 installed and have been getting
> a lot(hundreds) of unable to open bull data base errors:
>
> Wed Oct 18 08:50:56 2000 [21062] gdbm_open failed: Resource temporarily
> unavailable (11)
> Wed Oct 18 08:50:56 2000
> Wed Oct 18 08:50:56 2000 [21062] tcmed16 at 192.168.233.1
> (192.168.233.1): -ERR [SYS/TEMP] Unable to open Bulletin data base;
> contact your administrator
>
> For long time everything will work fine then it pukes for a while and
> works again. I have been unable to resolve the problem and was wondering
> if any one has had any experience with this before?
>
> I see that qpopper 3.1 has the -B switch to allow mail to be popped even
> if the bull data base can't be read. I am going to upgrade to 3.1 but
> was curious as to why the gdbm failure occurs.
When a bulletin database is used, there is one global database for
all users. During a login Qpopper must open this database
read-write, which means only one session at a time. When there is a
heavy server load (lots of sessions at the same time) some sessions
are unable to lock the database in a reasonable amount of time.
Version 3.1 has fine-tuned the algorithm so that Qpopper waits for a
small fraction of a second (instead of multiple seconds) between
tries, and thus is able to try many more times. As a result, if you
upgrade to 3.1 you may find you do not even need the '-B' switch at
all.
You can also elect to have a file in each user's home directory,
instead of one global database. To do this, enable bulletins but do
not enable the bulletin database. That way there is no contention at
all. The downside is that each user needs a home directory that is
writable, and there are problems if the user is over quota.
