Chris Shenton wrote: > Greg Earle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> But we have these few recalcitrant users who don't seem to know that "Keep >> Messages On The Server" is bad. Really Bad. Especially when these few >> people have mail spool files that are over 50 Mbytes in size. Some of >> them even closer to 100 Mbytes (or over). > > IMHO users do this not because they're trying to be butt-heads, but > because they're trying to get work done. If their mail is sitting on > their desktop at work, they can't access it on the road. etc.
The small group of recalcitrants is made up of a couple of people that might fit that category, but the others are just lazy non-mobile astronomers :-)
>> Naturally, every time these people POP in, the system goes into complete
>> I/O and CPU starvation mode as all cycles get used up copying their huge
>> mail spools to /var/mail/.luser.pop and then back again to /var/mail/luser.
>
> Is this just when a user deletes a message? Or even when they just
> read a message (does the pop server have to touch the message content
> to update attributes like Status?). Either way, expensive I admit.
I'm not sure - all I know is that when I'm actually watching, the load average jumps up to 3 or 4, I clamp a truss on the qpopper processes and sure enough, they're doing the luser -> .luser.pop -> luser copies. Then I start to get complaints from others about how "the POP server is sluggish".
I see the same problem from time to time - on a PIII-800. A user accessing a spool file >50MB causes IO starvation while the copying is going on and the load average shoots up, making the machine quite sluggish. If you find a solution I'd be interested to know what it is....
Regards, Simon
