user_deny.db, very high load and Apple-Spotlight

[Mark Heisterkamp]

Hi,

we graded up to cyrus 2.3.16 a few weeks ago and since then the load 
average showed values from 200 to 300 a few times per day. The server 
has 16 cores, 64GB RAM an is attached to a SAN. This machine is quite 
powerfull. It serves about 5000 mailboxes.

First we "touched" user_deny.db to get rid of these annoying 
IOERROR-messages. These messages where replaced by (annoying) 'fetching 
user_deny.db'-entries. A normal IMAP-user causes about 500 to 1500 of 
such messages in eight hours.

But we found two users who 'generated' 5000000 (!) and 250000 of such 
messages in this period. After phoning them we found out, that they 
where using Mac OS X and Thunderbird 3 (the one with 5 Mio messages) and 
Mail.app (the other one). Turning off the spotlight-search on 
IMAP-folders immediately turned the load average down to a normal value 
(about 0.2).

I think we shouldn't advise 5000 users not to use Spotlight, we should 
deactivate user_deny.db. By the way, what is this database really good 
for? If we want someone not to use cyrus-service we deny this person by 
ldap for example. Kenneth Murchison stated in some mail on this list 
that user_deny.db is used once per login, that's definitely not true, it 
is used every time the client 'uses' an IMAP-folder and that can be 
pretty often! Maybe we can change this behaviour by some config?

Is it possible to deactivate fetching user_deny.db-entries by some 
config-option or do we have to patch the sources?

Regards,
Mark

-- 
Mark Heisterkamp                        RRZN
Tel: +49 511 762-5134                   Schlosswender Str.5
Fax: +49 511 762-3003                   D-30159 Hannover

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 5813 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Url : http://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/pipermail/info-cyrus/attachments/20100412/2b07b5e2/attachment.bin