Hi seen file lock suffers, I cleaned up the documentation, patchability, and added up some comments to my patch to work around seen file locking issues in cyrus 2.0.16 and 2.1.3. For those who have already installed it, there are no changes in functionality. (Thanks to Thomas Jarosch and others for the tips)
See: http://servercc.oakton.edu/~jwade/cyrus/Readme.html or just browse the directory: http://servercc.oakton.edu/~jwade/cyrus/ So far four folks have tried this (two on 2.0.16 and two on 2.1.3) and it seems to have worked around the problem for them. (As it has for us) To recap: The symptoms we saw were not tied to the mailboxes.db or any of the Berkeley db databases. Instead, I would have processes that would lock up trying to access a user's mailbox. Subsequent attempts to access the mailbox would block waiting for the first process to release the locks on the various header and seen files in the mailbox. Finally, incoming mail would die because all of the lmtpd processes would get blocked trying to deliver to the locked mailbox. An easy way to see if you are experiencing this is to use gdb to debug one of the processes and then do a bt (backtrace) if you see that the process is in the middle of an flock call. Full information to help you determine if you are experiencing the problem can be found at the link above. If you do use this patch, send me an email and let me know what platform you are on and if it worked for you, Enjoy, John
