On 20031119 1052, Michael Bowe wrote: > file locking is used in several places throughout vpopmail > > However the only place I have ever heard of it causing problems is inside > the roaming user functions. > > Usually you would need to have a fair number of POP3 logins happening before > you run into locking problems. Perhaps consult your POP3 logs and look to > see if you are recording a high number of POP3 connections. > > The problem is exacerbated when you are using CDB auth backend rather than > MySQL backend. MySQL removes some (but not all) of the file-based operations > for the roaming users code. > > Michael.
Hi Michael. Thanks for your reply. I have consulted the logs, and it seems that there are never more than 9 concurrent pop3 connections, as reported by tcpserver. The server is currently handling a small numbers of mailboxes - only a tiny fraction of the intended total. If it's struggling to keep up already, I dread to think how it will handle the rest. The box itself isn't exactly slow. It's a 1.7GHz Celeron, with a gigabyte of RAM, and twin 80Gb ATA100 disks in hardware ATA-RAID mirror config. The disks are both masters on seperate channels. I know this isn't ideal server spec, but the client has a very limited budget at the moment. Even so, I would expect it to be able to cope fairly easily. Can you, or anyone else, make any recommendations on trying to avoid or improve this bottleneck? I have been considering moving the entire ~vpopmail/etc directory onto a memory based filesystem for quicker access, with a backup copy on hard disk. What do you think of that idea? Moving to MySQL isn't ideal, due to my lack of experience with it. Many thanks in advance. Jason Mann
