user_deny.db, very high load and Apple-Spotlight

[Marc Patermann]

Hi,

Mark Heisterkamp schrieb am 12.04.2010 09:03 Uhr:

> 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?
I have this issue, too.
But there is no Mac involved. It is just Thunderbird on the client 
(Win*/Linux) side.

I created user_deny.db with touch to make the one error message go away. 
Now I have lots of "fetching ..." messages in the log (2.3.16).

Is there anything to do about this?


Marc