[Dovecot] NFS issues [was: Dovecot-1.2 + Sieve + Managesieve on Debian]

2010-03-23 Thread Brian Candler
On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 05:42:02AM -0400, Charles Marcus wrote:
 On 2010-03-22 9:31 PM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
  Dovecot has built in locking support for NFS storage.
 
 But it has always been problematic, according to Timo.

Have you got any references on this, apart from http://wiki.dovecot.org/NFS ?

I'm looking at migrating a courier-imap installation (FreeBSD frontends,
Netapp backends, Maildir++) to dovecot. I'd be grateful of any known
pitfalls I should be looking out for.

I have done some small-scale testing and it looks fine. tcpdumping the NFS
traffic, I see that the FreeBSD frontend is sending access requests to
check that its local cache is not stale.  In tests with mailboxes containing
100 messages and a web IMAP frontend (atmail.org), Dovecot was generating
about 1/4 of the total NFS traffic compared to courier-imap, because of how
Dovecot creates a cache file containing the message headers.

I see a link to http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=123755 in the NFS
wiki page.  Does this problem affect only mbox over NFS, or maildir too? 

I've not observed any problem with courier-imap, although courier-imap is
much dumber about caching, and also at the moment the majority of the
userbase are on POP3 anyway.

Regards,

Brian.


Re: [Dovecot] NFS issues [was: Dovecot-1.2 + Sieve + Managesieve on Debian]

2010-03-23 Thread Timo Sirainen
On 23.3.2010, at 13.43, Brian Candler wrote:

 I have done some small-scale testing and it looks fine.

Stress testing by running imaptest for same user's same mailbox in 2+ different 
servers (i.e. two NFS clients reading/writing same mailbox files) should show 
up quickly what kind of errors you could get. http://imapwiki.org/ImapTest



Re: [Dovecot] NFS issues [was: Dovecot-1.2 + Sieve + Managesieve on Debian]

2010-03-23 Thread Adam McDougall

On 03/23/10 07:43, Brian Candler wrote:

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 05:42:02AM -0400, Charles Marcus wrote:

On 2010-03-22 9:31 PM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:

Dovecot has built in locking support for NFS storage.


But it has always been problematic, according to Timo.


Have you got any references on this, apart from http://wiki.dovecot.org/NFS ?

I'm looking at migrating a courier-imap installation (FreeBSD frontends,
Netapp backends, Maildir++) to dovecot. I'd be grateful of any known
pitfalls I should be looking out for.

I have done some small-scale testing and it looks fine. tcpdumping the NFS
traffic, I see that the FreeBSD frontend is sending access requests to
check that its local cache is not stale.  In tests with mailboxes containing
100 messages and a web IMAP frontend (atmail.org), Dovecot was generating
about 1/4 of the total NFS traffic compared to courier-imap, because of how
Dovecot creates a cache file containing the message headers.

I see a link to http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=123755 in the NFS
wiki page.  Does this problem affect only mbox over NFS, or maildir too?

I've not observed any problem with courier-imap, although courier-imap is
much dumber about caching, and also at the moment the majority of the
userbase are on POP3 anyway.

Regards,

Brian.



I've used:

mmap_disable: yes
mail_nfs_storage: yes
mail_nfs_index: yes

on FreeBSD 6/7/8 and dovecot with multiple servers accessing the same 
mailboxes over NFS on a NetApp and it has worked fine since 1.0.16 or 
so, I think.  I use 1.1 now (haven't finished testing 1.2 and haven't 
done much with 8.x).  I have a load balancer in front and it sends IMAPS 
connections or HTTPS connections (making local IMAP calls) to randomized 
servers so even one person making 5 connections gets a speed benefit by 
using more than one server.


If the NFS support had problems you could also use mail_location to keep 
indexes local.