On Tue, 24 Mar 2009 08:12:07 +0100, Timo Sirainen <t...@iki.fi> wrote:
There is only one difference between what IDLE does and what a non-
IDLEing connection does: If inotify/dnotify/kqueue is enabled, Dovecot
notices immediately when a new mail pops up in new/ or cur/ directory
and does a resync. Hmm. Actually now I see one possibility if qmail-
local was written in a stupid/buggy way:
1. qmail-local does rename tmp/file -> new/file
2. Dovecot notices new/file and renames it to cur/file:2, immediately
3. qmail-local stats new/file to see if rename() succeeded (not
necessary), notices it's no longer there and fails with quota failure
(..but why quota failure?..)
The quota failure comes from a patch. An unpatched qmail-local thinks the mail
was not delivered properly, gives a temporary error and tries the delivery
again... and again... and again.
I'm no C expert, therefore I can't tell how qmail-local handles the delivery
exactly.
That's the only explanation I can think of. This could be tested by
compiling Dovecot with --with-notify=none configure option, which would
cause IDLE to check for new mails only once in a while and make it much
less likely to hit the race condition.
I tried that already, but that was at the very beginning of my troubleshooting. The only other reference to the problem I'm experiencing was from a guy using Debian, who got around it by installing the inotify packages.
Will --with-notify=none disable kevent and inotify/dnotify? I'll give it
another shot then and report back.
Jochen
