Monolithic mailboxes.db?

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> We are going to upgrade to Cyrus v2.3 sometime before midsummer.
> Currently, we are running an old, old version of Cyrus with a plaintext
> mailboxes file. Now and again, an imapd process gets stuck and keeps the
> writelock on the mailboxes file - so we have to kill the stuck process
> manually before anybody else can complete any mailbox manipulation
> procedure. This is, needless to say, annoying.
> While planning this upgrade, my colleagues have been asking me whether
> the mailboxes database in current Cyrus is monolithic in the same way:

I believe so.

> if one process keeps a lock to one part of it, does it in fact have all
> of the file locked? To be more exact, is this the case with the Skiplist
> db format? We can't use berkeley because it doesn't work well with
> clustering and GFS (see previous posts on the subject, and pse don't
> tell me you can't cluster Cyrus).

I've never seen such an issue with a Skiplist database.  I suspect what
you are primarily seeing is a long since fixed bug.

--
Adam Tauno Williams
Morrison Industries