[gentoo-user] Courier-Imap slowing to a crawl

[gentoo-user] Courier-Imap slowing to a crawl

[James Colannino]

Hey everyone.  I've been running a Gentoo mail server here at home for 
almost 3 years and have had great luck with it.  However, since I made a 
large group of updates a few weeks ago, Courier-Imap has been slowing 
down, so much so that my client requests eventually time out.  A reboot 
fixes this, but it's gotten to the point where I'd have to reboot every 
single day in order to keep it running the way it should be, and I know 
there must be some way to fix this.  I've tried just restarting the 
Courier daemons, but this alone is not sufficient.

Courier-Imap was never updated, so that shouldn't be the problem.  
However, the packages that were updated (with new USE flags; using 
--newuse) were Postfix, OpenLDAP (newly merged), Apache (from 1.3 to 
2.0), OpenSSL (I suspected at first that I had to build Courier and 
Courier-authlib again against the new OpenSSL, but this didn't prove to 
help) and a few others (unfortunately, I can't remember what they were, 
but I highly doubt they were related.)

Just to see if this would help, I tried rebuilding Courier-Imap and 
Courier-authlib after having merged the new packages.  Unfortunately, 
this did not help.  Authentication itself goes quick.  However, at the 
point where Thunderbird says, "Looking for folders," (sorry I couldn't 
be more descriptive than that) it goes on and on and on and eventually 
times out.  After I've rebooted, it goes quickly like it always did 
before the updates, but then it gradually slows down, and by the next 
day, it's usually really bad again.

I wondered if something was hogging the CPU, or if something was leaking 
memory, but I checked both those things, and so far, I don't think 
either of those are a problem.

The only other change I can think of is that I had been compiling with 
-O3 optimizations ever since the server was built (I always had great 
luck with that and it's been very stable; I actually believe this may 
have been the default setting at the time), but decided to step down to 
-O2 before I built all those other packages since I wanted to make sure 
everything would be stable.  Does the fact that some packages were 
compiled with -O3 optimizations and the fact that more recently some 
were built with -O2 optimizations cause some kind of problem?  Is there 
a way that I can rebuild my entire server on either -O2 or -O3 
optimizations so that I can make everything consistent?  Should I even 
care about that?

I'm just trying to throw out every possibility here as this is one of 
the most bizarre things that's happened to me to date.  If anybody has 
any ideas, or if anybody has had any similar problems, a reply would be 
greatly appreciated! :)  Thanks everyone.

James

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