Miserable performance of cyrus-imapd 2.3.9 -- seems to be locking issues

[Kenneth Marshall]

Jeff,

Delivery database format can cause this type of problem, among
other databases. For any DB that is updated with contention, use
either BerkeleyDB or Skiplist format. We also had a similar issue
when we did not have the expunge process running and pruning the
delivery database and its size kept growing until it slowed down
the entire system.

Cheers,
Ken

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 02:38:37PM -0700, Jeff Fookson wrote:
> Folks-
> 
> I am hoping to get some help and guidance as to why our installation of 
> cyrus-imapd 2.3.9
> is unusably slow. Here are the specifics:
> 
> The software is running on a 1.6GHz Opteron with 2Gb memory supporting a 
> user base of about 400
> users. The average rate of arriving mail is on the order of 1-2 
> messages/sec. The active mailstore
> is about 200GB.  There are typically about 200  'imapd'
> processes at a given time and a hugely varying number of 'lmtpds' (from 
> about 6 to many hundreds during
> times of greatest pathology). System load is correspondingly in the 2-15 
> range, but can spike to 50-70!
> 
> Our users complain that the system is extremely sluggish during the day 
> when the system is most busy.
> 
> The most obvious thing we observe is that both the lmtpds and the imapds 
> are spending HUGE times waiting
> on locks. Even when the system load is only 1-2, an 'strace' attached to 
> an instance of lmtpd or imapd shows
> waits of  upwards of 1-2 minutes to get a write lock as shown by the 
> example below (this is from a trace of an 'lmtpd')
> 
> [strace -f -p 9817 -T]
> 9817  fcntl(10, F_SETLKW, {type=F_WRLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=0, 
> len=0}) = 0 <84.998159>
> 
> We strongly suspect that these large times waiting on locks is what is 
> causing the slowness our users are reporting.
> 
> We are under the impression that a single instance of cyrus-imapd scales 
> well up to about 1000 users (with about 1MB active
> memory per 'imapd' process),  and so we are baffled as to what might be 
> going on.
> 
> A non-standard aspect of our installation which may have something to do 
> with the problem is that we are
> running cyrus on an lvm2 partition that itself is running on top of 
> drbd. Thinking that the remote writes
> to the drbd secondary might be causing delays, we put the primary in 
> stand-alone mode so that the drbd layer
> was not doing any network activity (the drbd link is running at gigabit 
> speed on its own crossover cable to
> the secondary box) and saw no significant change in behavior. Any issues 
> due to locking and the lvm2 layer
> would, of course, still be present even with drbd's activity reduced to 
> just local writes.
> 
> Can anyone suggest what we might do next to debug the problem further? 
> Needless to say, our users get
> extremely unhappy when trivial operations in their mail clients take 
> over a minute to complete.
> 
> Thank you for any thoughts or advice.
> 
> Jeff Fookson
> 
> -- 
> Jeffrey E. Fookson, PhD			Phone: (520) 621 3091
> Support Systems Analyst, Principal	jfookson at as.arizona.edu
> Steward Observatory
> University of Arizona
> 
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