Cyrus lagging accepting IMAP connections

[Rick Kunkel]

Hm!  I did some additional reading after receiving this, and it seems that 
pursuing the random number generator path is the way to go...

A coupla quick questions (that I think are likely going to be answered 
with "it depends" answers):

1.  Is nuking /dev/random in the way described going to have adverse 
affects on other elements/services?

2.  If, andter going this, I want to restore /dev/random to what it was 
beforehand, how would I go about doing that?

3.  We used aptitude (in all its inflexibility) to install sasl.  Does 
anyone know if there is an easy way to change this compile-time flag, but 
still use aptitude to install SASL?  (Probably off-topic for this list, I 
admit.)

Thanks!

Rick Kunkel

On Tue, 11 Sep 2007, Scott M. Likens wrote:

> Rick,
>
> This problem is related to Debian using /dev/random instead of /dev/urandom.
>
> Short term solution would be to rm /dev/random
>
> mknod /dev/random c 1 9
>
> The other solution for you would be to recompile the sources and change
> the configure to use urandom instead of random... You can search the
> archives and search for urandom on how to do that.
>
> Scott
>
> Rick Kunkel wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I'm new to Cyrus.  Historically, I've used Qpopper, Sendmail, and UW IMAP.
>> We recently switched to Cyrus for IMAP.  It came highly recommended...
>>
>> We've got this on a darned burly machine, running some very recent version
>> of Debian, with a fast CPU, 4GB RAM, and fast SAS drives.  When testing
>> the thing, before it went into production, everything worked awesomely.
>> However, having loaded it with 2300 users, it's suddenly acting
>> erratically.  (Incidentally, of the 2300 users, almost all are POP users,
>> which seems to be working fine.  A few hundred -- at most -- are IMAP, and
>> they are split between squirrelmail users and a handful that use standard
>> MUAs.)
>>
>> The server acts as if it's low on resources or something, or has hit some
>> kind of connection limit.  It's speedy as heck WHEN it does it what's it's
>> supposed to, but that initial connection is sketchy.  For the first 30
>> seconds after you restart it, it's generally good, but it goes downhill
>> from there.
>>
>> Testing with telnet exhibits this behavior.  Here's a sample session...
>>
>> # telnet mail 143
>> Trying xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx...
>> Connected to mail.
>> Escape character is '^]'.
>>
>>
>> And then it just kinda sits.  Sometimes, after 30 seconds or so
>>
>> * OK mail Cyrus IMAP4 v2.2.13-Debian-2.2.13-10 server ready
>>
>>
>> We're currently using the following line in cyrus.conf for imapd:
>>
>> imap	cmd="imapd" listen="imap" prefork=1
>>
>>
>> We've messed with tons of different settings here, to little avail.
>>
>> There don't seem to be any salient log entries.
>>
>> Anyone have any ideas?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Rick Kunkel
>> ----
>> Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/
>> Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki
>> List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
>>
>>
>> !DSPAM:46e6fb8c80805986443841!
>>
>>
>>
>
>