Tony Rutherford wrote:
Timo Sirainen wrote:
On 20.1.2010, at 22.21, Attila Nagy wrote:
After running through http://wiki.dovecot.org/IndexFiles I'm not
sure how well would Dovecot work with other programs modifying the
maildirs (adding, deleting, moving messages, folders etc).
The "Main index" section says "The index file is synchronized
against mailbox only if the syncing information changes.", where
syncing information consists or cur and new directories' timestamps.
Does that mean I am safe there?
Yes. The worst that can happen is that Dovecot doesn't see external
changes for 2 seconds. And that's only if your filesystem doesn't
support sub-second timestamps.
Are the above right, and can Dovecot use its indexes and caches
safely with others using the same maildirs?
Yes. I've only recently added maildir_very_dirty_syncs=yes that
improves performance but makes it work less safely when other
programs modify the maildir.
Although there is kind of a potential problem if other programs
modify the maildir without locking.
http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir#Locking but that isn't
unique to Dovecot. That would cause problems with all programs
accessing maildir. Dovecot just logs an error about it, instead of
silently giving broken information to IMAP clients.
We have the exact same configuration, and we had similar concerns.
I'm happy to say that we (so far) have been pleasantly surprised by
how well Dovecot handles this situation and keeps its index files in
synch while other 3rd parties (web, etc.) are changing the Maildirs.
It seems very reliable, and we haven't seen any problems.
Great to hear that, thanks for sharing!
