[TriLUG] Maildir too full?

[Josh Vickery]

Hi Randy,

>  The other thing I should mention is that it seems to happen only if I
>  haven't deleted something for a while.  That is, if I delete something
>  after a long period, it will take a long time.  But if I delete
>  something immediately afterwards, it will go through normally.  Seems
>  like maybe there's some kind of caching, perhaps?

This may be completely wrong, but what's your memory usage like on the
machine? How about swap space, do you have a sufficient amount of
that? If the VM isn't able to swap very effectively it could be that
your buffer cache and/or directory cache are being flushed too often,
and your delete operation is causing direct disk access.

10-30 seconds seems rather long for that, but if you have a lot of
files or directories that the imap daemon has to access, and your
directory cache does not contain any of them that could be part of the
explanation.

Another related thought is that you might try remounting the partition
with the imap folders with the "noatime" option. If you are indeed
running out of buffer cache then it could be that the imap daemon is
accessing a number of different files, which, with atime tracking,
would mean writing to a bunch of files, which might further explain
the long pauses.

Josh