Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: James Colannino <gentoo@×××××××××.org>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-user] Courier-Imap slowing to a crawl
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 18:27:44
Message-Id: 4409D92D.7080409@colannino.org
1 Hey everyone. I've been running a Gentoo mail server here at home for
2 almost 3 years and have had great luck with it. However, since I made a
3 large group of updates a few weeks ago, Courier-Imap has been slowing
4 down, so much so that my client requests eventually time out. A reboot
5 fixes this, but it's gotten to the point where I'd have to reboot every
6 single day in order to keep it running the way it should be, and I know
7 there must be some way to fix this. I've tried just restarting the
8 Courier daemons, but this alone is not sufficient.
9
10 Courier-Imap was never updated, so that shouldn't be the problem.
11 However, the packages that were updated (with new USE flags; using
12 --newuse) were Postfix, OpenLDAP (newly merged), Apache (from 1.3 to
13 2.0), OpenSSL (I suspected at first that I had to build Courier and
14 Courier-authlib again against the new OpenSSL, but this didn't prove to
15 help) and a few others (unfortunately, I can't remember what they were,
16 but I highly doubt they were related.)
17
18 Just to see if this would help, I tried rebuilding Courier-Imap and
19 Courier-authlib after having merged the new packages. Unfortunately,
20 this did not help. Authentication itself goes quick. However, at the
21 point where Thunderbird says, "Looking for folders," (sorry I couldn't
22 be more descriptive than that) it goes on and on and on and eventually
23 times out. After I've rebooted, it goes quickly like it always did
24 before the updates, but then it gradually slows down, and by the next
25 day, it's usually really bad again.
26
27 I wondered if something was hogging the CPU, or if something was leaking
28 memory, but I checked both those things, and so far, I don't think
29 either of those are a problem.
30
31 The only other change I can think of is that I had been compiling with
32 -O3 optimizations ever since the server was built (I always had great
33 luck with that and it's been very stable; I actually believe this may
34 have been the default setting at the time), but decided to step down to
35 -O2 before I built all those other packages since I wanted to make sure
36 everything would be stable. Does the fact that some packages were
37 compiled with -O3 optimizations and the fact that more recently some
38 were built with -O2 optimizations cause some kind of problem? Is there
39 a way that I can rebuild my entire server on either -O2 or -O3
40 optimizations so that I can make everything consistent? Should I even
41 care about that?
42
43 I'm just trying to throw out every possibility here as this is one of
44 the most bizarre things that's happened to me to date. If anybody has
45 any ideas, or if anybody has had any similar problems, a reply would be
46 greatly appreciated! :) Thanks everyone.
47
48 James
49
50 --
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